Rocky Top Bear Show

And the Karma Train strikes the Asylum!

2011-08-19T15:32:00.000-04:00

I hope that ma chérie amour won't mind my purloining a bit of her Canfield composition today...The amount of coincidence involved in the buildup that led to an armed officer doing a sweep of my home today (with gun drawn, mind you) is absolutely not coincidental... I should probably go buy a lottery ticket today.

The younger of the twins (we'll call him Simon) is quite the talker and gadget hound… Always sneaking away with an iPod touch or an iPad and playing some games we play together. He has called about everyone on my wife's cell phone. On several occasions. With abandon. Finally put a lock on the cell phone. I found out today that 911 is not included in such locks!

So… the twins (we'll call them Simon and Levi) were caught red-handed dismantling their closet AND/OR dumping chemicals on the carpet that have no business being on the carpet AND/OR orchestrating general mayhem in their room, at which point they were grounded to sit on their beds while my wife took a shower. Simon must have thought that she went to lie down ( I got tired just hearing the story!) and decided to see who he could call to gripe about his "incarceration" with the contraband cell phone he managed to smuggle in ...please enjoy the following dramatic transcription of one of his 6 calls to the 911 call center:

"911, what is your emergency?"
Response: heavy breathing.
"Hello? This is 911. What is your emergency?"
Simon: "My Mom is not talking to me. She's tired."
Operator: "Why is she tired? Is she sick? Is she hurt?"
Simon: "She tired. Of me. She's sleeping."
"Can you wake her up?"
Simon: "No, she not talking".
Operator: "I'm sending a unit. Can you tell me your address, Honey?"
Simon: "Wee-vi and I make a mess in our room. We in trouble".
Operator: "Honey, where do you live?"
Simon: "My neighbor is building a swim pool". (of course… Simon can't remember his address… but notices out his window that the neighbor is building a swimming pool… Makes perfect sense, doesn't it ?)

Going on just that information, Officer Krupky does a sweep of the neighborhood until he hears the blood-curdling screams of the "incarcerated" Simon and Levi, and proceeds to enter the home. Fortunately, my wife managed to finish showering and dressing at this point, but I can't imagine that assuaged her much as she met an armed officer on the stairs who didn't know whether she was a victim, suspect, or person of interest at that point.

Needless to say, Simon had the riot act read to him today...and he's mulling the "wait till your father gets home" soundbite over and over, I'm sure.

Simon...you in trouble all right...but I think the mess in the room is the least of your worries!!!

The Day the Left Bank Died....

2011-04-26T00:12:00.000-04:00

Waxing nostalgic....I LOVE this video:

It has the flavor of "American Pie" (with all of the embedded cultural references) with French twist, of course. Watching the imagined draining of the Seine still brings a tear to the eye. I used to offer this song up as the "road to an automatic A" if a student could identify and explain all of the hidden cultural references. They worked like gangbusters for a week or two, then figured it was easier to just do their homework. But they would hound me about it semesters after the course was over.

Somehow, I don't think Alain needs to worry as much anymore about US, given how impuissant we've become....

Cloud, meet Atlas. Atlas, meet Cloud.

2011-04-19T16:20:00.001-04:00

Somebody with two similar Windoze machines running atlas.ti needs to try something for me…

Theoretically, if one were to put one's hermeneutical unit within a folder in Dropbox, along with all associated files, one should be able to call all of that up on two separate computers running atlas.ti, non?

Well, I've poked at least one hole in that theory…

I can open up the hermeneutical unit… no problems. However, the primary documents do not appear, as they cannot be found. The problem seems to be the fact that atlas.ti links PDs to the HU using * absolute pathways*!! And since pathways on a Mac running Windoze are not absolutely identical to the pathways on a PeeCee running Windoze... you see the problem.

Dear Atlas.ti: * relative pathways*...learn them, use them. And while you're at it, port your program to MacOS already!!

Dear rich fat-cat with two PeeCees running Atlas.ti: will you please try this experiment with your computers and report your results here? I'm dying to know if this works between oranges and oranges, since it obviously doesn't work between Apples and oranges.

I'm sorry, I meant to say lemons...Apples and lemons....

A bit of situational levity in the midst of EOS chaos

2011-04-19T08:40:00.000-04:00

http://www.phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=908

While other places have ponies, or parrots... we have dragons.

2011-04-12T14:57:00.000-04:00

I am in transcription hell. I would have quit well over an hour ago were it not for the lovely and talented Dragon.

Looking at a multimodal transcript after-the-fact is pretty fun, but, just like sausage, no one should ever have to see it made. It's not pretty. How "not pretty" is it, you ask? Let me tell you...I'd rather take the GRE over and over... how's that for you?

At least my fingers are not throbbing and popping... love the Dragon... feed the Dragon...

In my scholarly meanderings this week, I came across an interesting article that I started to read ( I probably should be reading the stuff I should be reading, but I couldn't resist the shiny PDF), not because I really believe in it, but it's helping me to separate a ( flavor?) of DASP from other flavors and from other theories:

de Rosa, A. (2006). The “boomerang” effect of radicalism in Discursive Psychology: A critical overview of the controversy with the Social Representations Theory. Journal for the Theory of Social Behavior 36:2, 161–201.

It offers itself up as a critical overview of the catfight between radicalized DASP and this "SRT", but it does a really good job of giving you the range of DASP stances and some theories, affinities, and battles on the margins. Or so it seems so far.

bof...

2011-04-04T22:58:00.001-04:00

Participant observation this week...not looking forward to transcription. JT comes to mind this week...(Well, JT channeling GJ...actually, AG does a nice version):

"Well, I'm just a researcher, and I don't like my work...but I don't mind the data at all...."

Fortunately, I don't feel like this often. I guess if I ever get to the point where I have "translated" the entire song, I need to pack it in and content myself with praxis and anecdote...

Potter/Edwards/Hepburn...burn...burn...burn Sacks...

Did you know that the 1200 pages of the Handbook of Research in Second Language Teaching and Learning was insufficient? That there is a second volume of similar magnitude?

This week, I pine for the simpler days....

WWJD?

2011-03-29T13:40:00.004-04:00

Went to see J.'s defense today. Stunning… absolutely stunning. However, stunning in a very affirming, unexpected way.

J. would never in a million years talk about herself in these terms, but many of my colleagues (and myself) talk of her in terms that echo people from my former life as a medievalist. There were professors and students all those many years ago who were lovingly (love meaning in this case admiration, respect, collegiality, but mostly idolatry tinged with a perceptible hue of envy) referred to as "sick-savant". The professor who could quote pages upon pages — verbatim and in Middle English — from the Riverside Chaucer and most of the secondary literature... the student who had seemingly memorized their entire dissertation, the annotated bibliography of their literature review, and most of the major articles they cited. We were all so much in awe and amazement, yet at the same time so conscious of our own foibles and feelings of imposterism that the quasi-natural reflex was to pathologize the behavior, because to do anything short of painting their performance as non-normative would have us all asking for their autograph and then running back to our offices for a dose of our Cymbalta (actually, back then it would have been Elavil or Pamelor, but I digress.....).

Today, I think a lot of us saw side of J. that those who know her much better likely take for granted, but which makes the rest of us think that we could actually emulate her in many respects and be the better for it, regardless of whether we're quite as brilliant. I can't speak for everyone else ( they all have their own blogs...) but I wanted to share at least a couple of places where I took great solace and comfort from what J. had to say. This is not to say that these were the only places where I felt great solace and comfort... there were a lot of places where expository snippets of her theoretical and methodological perspectives resonated strongly with what I want to do, and brought some of those things into sharper focus. I'm more interested for now in what follows.

Dr. G. asked the immortal Dr. G. question: "What do you know now that you didn't know before?" This was the first time that I heard J. talk about her struggle with moving away from the medicalized language of her dissertation topic and the journey of inscribing herself in the critique of the constrained use of language as she wrote. I cannot begin to tell you what a painful process it has been (and continues to be) for me personally to attempt to extract myself from the cognitive nomenclature and discourse that I marinate in on a daily basis. Neo got to take a pill...the rest of us aren't that lucky. I know it has been the source of some critiques of my writing, and I was beginning to think that it was just me. You have no idea what a cathartic moment the answer to that question was to me!

Another cathartic moment was when J. discussed the travails of research… the tedium and neck pain brought on by the transcription process, the mental and emotional exhaustion of participant observation... it is so refreshing to have something so mundane in common with someone you admire so much!

Oh, I could go on... the discussion of what inclusionary communication practices would look like in a radicalized version of higher education, her gracious offer to send those who ask her journal entries pertaining to personal reactions to doing research (by the way, I'm asking...)... What about her avowal/observation/accusation that "This" (she was likely referring to her dissertation but it doesn't take a whole lot of mental horsepower to see that there is a j'accuse about what we do in academics...indeed, what we do period...buried in her confession) "is trafficking in some version of the world."?

So, I'm an unashamed groupie now. I'm making a club. Line forms behind me. I will read her journal, and her dissertation. Anyone who knows Dr. G. knows that she doesn't "blow smoke", so when she holds J.'s dissertation up as an excellent example of clarity for other students to follow, that is genuine praise couched as an invitation to everyone else in the room. I may not be smart, but I know what smart is.....

Representing Reality in the Social Studies of Science

2011-03-28T14:42:00.000-04:00

Potter, J. (1996) Representing reality: discourse, rhetoric and social construction. London, Sage.

Science would like you to think "that everyone's knowledge claims are assessed by essentially the same impersonal criteria" which lends to the idea that "scientific status is gained through merit rather than patronage or social position." (18)

Riiiight.

I like Potter's (well, Collins', really) example of the gravity-wave controversy as a confirmation of Rorty's formulation that: "no interesting epistemological difference could be identified between the pursuit of knowledge and the pursuit of power." (36) Science is constructed.

As it is constructed by humans situated within unique social realities, scientific inquiry will result in "homologies between the structure of knowledge and the structure of society", meaning that scientists "will be literally rediscovering or redescribing the structure of their society in their test-tubes and cloud chambers." (38) Scientists "are also involved in processes of selective ironization and reification as they assemble an account" (39).

I'm thinking it might be a good idea to delve into the history of efficacy studies in CALL and link it up to
Potter's argument on interest theory.....

Lego Therapy for Undergrads!

2011-03-28T14:08:00.000-04:00

Now THIS is a midterm.

#BSawhill needs to be cloned and injected into about 5 or 6 disciplines that I can think of off the top of my head...

Literature Review: To ti or not to ti?

2011-03-23T12:23:00.000-04:00

I'm torn.

I have to admit to LOVING having scanned everything I am reading for lit. review / dissertation. Using Acrobat, I can highlight, add notes, have searchable text, and my scribblings can be immortalized in my PDF and tucked away nicely in Mendeley, searchable and all!

BUUUUT.....

I can't really synthesize anything beyond that, which I find VERY annoying. There is no way I am going to keep links I saw, gaps I realized, etc. straight in my dysfunctional brain.

I am going to credit J.L. for giving me the novel-to-me thought of the potential of using Atlas.ti for facilitating the lit. review process. I don't remember whether she was explicit about it or whether I just noticed it as she was taking us through her data, but it led me to feed "literature review in atlas.ti" into the gaping jaws of the Google, which then gave me this article straight from Atlas.ti, as well as this PDF on using NVIVO for the lit. review. I agree with the premise that the act of formulating arguments and research questions from a body of literature mirrors the qualitative data analysis process. You read, reflect, and interact with the literature, identify themes, compare and contrast ideas and strands from different works, and construct arguments with links to supporting evidence in the literature. What's not to love?

Thinking that I had just made my life infinitely easier, I plugged a PDF into Atlas.ti. I was excited when I saw my highlights made in Acrobat show up on the PDF in Atlas.ti...then less excited when I noticed that my embedded notes did not make the cut on the import. Then, I got to thinking about all of this wonderful mental light that would play colorfully upon these documents, and how I was going to save it in something like Mendeley...Holy qualitative quandry, how AM I going to export ANY of this into something durable?

Now what do I do?
What would you do?
What do you think?

J'aime la groupie du technologue

2011-03-14T09:13:00.000-04:00

I am fortunate beyond words. Ma chérie amour is not just out of my league, but my galaxy. There's a Michel berger song for that:

I have gone from thinking "mais Dieu que cette fille prend des risques...amoureuse d'un égoïste" to realizing that "elle m'aime, elle m'adore. Plus que tout elle m'aime, c'est beau comme elle m'aime." I know that "elle me suivrait jusqu'en enfer et même l'enfer, c'est pas grand-chose". I look at the track of 15 years and learning how to dance everything from a pas de deux to a pas de neuf, and I can't wait to see that the next 35 bring!

Exercises de style...version 80s

2011-03-08T00:09:00.000-05:00

Phil:

Look at me, you never look at me,
Ooh, I've been sitting, staring, seems so long.
But you're looking through me
Like I wasn't here at all.
No reply, there's no reply at all.

Bill:

If I looked all over the world
And there's ev'ry type of girl
But your empty eyes seem to pass me by
And leave me dancin' with myself.

Saldaña 4-5

2011-03-07T23:48:00.000-05:00

Resonant Saldaña quotes in 4-5:

"Second Cycle coding methods, if needed, are advanced ways of reorganizing and reanalyzing data coded through First Cycle methods." (So when would second cycle coding NOT be needed?)

"Pattern Coding develops the "meta-code" -the category label that identifies similarly coded data. Pattern Codes not only organize the corpus but attempt to attribute meaning to that organization."

"Sometimes we become overwhelmed by the magnitude ofour studies and thus need to intentionally focus the parameters of our investigation in progress to find its core. Forcing yourself to select a limited number of various ideas that have emerged from your study encourages you to prioritize the multiple observations and reflect on their essential meanings."

Codeweaving "as a heuristic to explore the possible and plausible interaction and interplay of your major codes."

"...rest assured that discussing one thing at a time keeps you focused as a writer, and keeps us focused as readers. After you've discussed each element separately, then you can begin your reflections on how these items may connect and weave complexly together."

More Saldaña

2011-02-28T23:05:00.000-05:00

Saldaña, Jonny (2009). The coding manual for qualitative researchers. London: Sage. (chs. 1 and 2)

I liked Saldaña's description of the "reverberative nature of coding"...the idea that "the qualitative analytic process is cyclical rather than linear." (45) I liked that Saldaña embraces almost a play with coding but at the same time eschews "employing too many methods for one study (such as ten First Cycle coding methods) or integrating incompatible methods." (47)

Is this why I am having trouble with coding? Saldaña mentions that "some research genres, such as discourse analysis, may not employ coding at all but rely instead on detailed transcription notation and extensive analytic memos about the data", yet I think that even DA and CA folk would admit to coding, would they not? Perhaps for different reasons and as a means to zero in on things, perhaps?

And I CAN "develop new or hybrid coding methods or adapt existing schemes, customized to suit the unique needs and disciplinary concerns of [my] study. (60) But perhaps when I get my "sea legs".

Perhaps now just a few shout-outs for what I liked/thought made sense. We could work on any of these I liked...not so much the ones toward the end of First Cycle:

FIRST CYCLE CODING METHODS

Grammatical Methods
- Attribute Coding (as a management technique as Saldaña suggests)
Elemental Methods (many seem to come fron GT)
- Structural Coding (because if you have a structure to apply, this would make a versatile template, no?)
- Descriptive Coding (easy to conflate these two...I may use them too interchangeably, but I think the essence behind them is a good template for any similar approach)
- In Vivo Coding...was shocked last semester to see that this sprung from GT, because I felt it liberating to use in ethnography.
Affective Methods (for the most part I am uncomfortable with these because I think they are too tricky to use...ethically is not the word I want, but effectively as a good researcher, but I find that...)
- Versus Coding (may be useful for DP because you can identify discourse that form mutually exclusive divisions, the necessary binaries for the type of deconstruction DP is good at.)
Literary and Language Methods (not feeling anything here)
Exploratory Methods (I thought maybe Holistic Coding, but the others seem so quantitative to me, I decided to stick to the elementals...
Procedural Methods (Procedural coding methods are prescriptive. 'nuff said.)

SECOND CYCLE CODING METHODS

"advanced ways of reorganizing and reanalyzing data coded through First Cycle methods"

Pattern Coding ("They are a sort of meta-code." Could be used to discuss what discourse is doing. Could be helpful!)

Helpful nuggets of wisdom from Saldaña:

The "top ten" list: would thiese be what I ultimately "go Jeffersonian" on?

"If you find yourself unable to start at the beginning, then begin with the conclusion"

"You can't see the frame when you're in the picture."

Brise Marine

2011-02-28T22:23:00.000-05:00

«Brise marine»...still works. Books may look different, as do lamps and what paper gets defined as nowadays, but the sentiment still holds, even if it morphs some and has much different targets for Mallarmé's readers than for Mallarmé. This part especially resonates with me tonight:

La chair est triste, hélas ! et j'ai lu tous les livres.
Fuir ! là-bas fuir! Je sens que des oiseaux sont ivres
D'être parmi l'écume inconnue et les cieux !
Rien, ni les vieux jardins reflétés par les yeux
Ne retiendra ce coeur qui dans la mer se trempe
Ô nuits ! ni la clarté déserte de ma «lampe»
Sur le vide «papier» que la blancheur défend...

Saldaña ▒ Codes and Analytic Memos

2011-02-21T09:54:00.000-05:00

Saldaña, Jonny (2009). The coding manual for qualitative researchers. London: Sage. (chs. 1 and 2)
Ochs, E. (1979). Transcription as theory. In E. Ochs & B. Schieffelin (Eds.), Developmental Pragmatics. New York: Academic Press.
Barron, P. (2010). Four principles of using digital tools to assist humanities research. Retrieved from http://nicomachus.net/2010/10/four-principles-of-using-digital-tools-to-assist-humanities-research/.

I appreicate the fact that Saldaña spells out, deductively and up-front, what his book is and isn't. To me, it is a "repertoire of coding methods in broad brushstrokes" (1) that doesn't hurt to read just to see what the possibilities are. You know, sometimes theories resonate with you and it inspires you to study associated methods in detail, sometimes methods resonate with you and it inspires you to study associated theories in detail. I like that he intends to purposely juxtapose coding methods "to illustrate and highlight the diverse opinions among scholars in the field." (2)

Saldaña gets right to the point and defines the basic unit of his book: "A code in qualitative inquiry is most often a word or short phrase that symbolically assigns a summative, salient, essence-capturing, and/or evocative attribute for a portion of language-based or visual data." (3) When you realize that those attributes are assigned by you, the researcher, it becomes easier to see that data transcription/analysis really is theory generation (Ochs 1979). I appreciate the fact that he defines, then gives several concrete examples from different general approaches to the coding process, and then channels Charmaz to explain why we can't conflate codes and categories...codes are the bones, categories are the starting work in assembling "those bones into a working skeleton" (8), from which will eventually spring themes and theory.
It sounds like we get (have) to code everything, but that as one becomes seasoned, it becomes easier to decide for oneself what can be overlooked. I'm thinking of this as "I know the tell-tale signs of what I'm interested in observing, so that's what I look for", which I get, but does that not stultify your research at some point? How do you keep research fresh and exciting if you are not looking for new things to resonate with you, or is this an admission that you know what will resonate with you, so if you don't see that, you move on?

How would I know? I'm a n00b...

I appreciate the walk through manual and CAQDAS coding (wish I would have seen that elsewhere...). And the attributes! Although, I almost wish the first attribute would have been better explained:

organization: It frustrates me that he defines organization ("a set of disciplined skills that can be learned and cultivated as habits", p. 28) but, unlike when he defined coding, he offers no concrete examples! What skills? Am I missing all/some/any? I mean, I get that one "will
...encounter and manipulate many pages of paper in qualitative work" and that even CAQDAS programs only go so far, but after laying the heavy on us, his advice is to "[d]ate and
label all incoming data and keep multiple digital and hard copies as backup"? It's a sad day when I have to dig into advice from digital HUMANITIES research to find solace! A recent post from Phillip Barron discusses the more important skill of learning to SEARCH, and that in fact it is increasingly more important than organizational skills, because "[k]eeping your work organized is a valuable skill, but at some point in your research, you are working on a project that is too large to hold in your head." So, "if you have been tagging information all along the way, then you have a way to search through your own stuff." Developing a strong sense of your own folksonomy seems to me a much more valuable way to burn brain cells than the traditional sense of "organization" because, as Barron (correctly, IMHO) points out, "I don’t know about you, but I am never going to remember that a pdf from JSTOR with the filename [dateauthorsmalltag.pdf] is an article on gender discrimination in the death penalty". When looking the data tsunami (Barron channeling Blatecky, not mine...I wish, though!) of a dissertation head-on, tagging and searching skills look a lot more life-saving than organizational skills. Of course, maybe that's what Saldaña was thinking of when he mentioned it. Too bad I'll never know.
perseverance: No kidding! When one is looking at the prospect of having to eat an elephant, it's perhaps not eating the elephant that seems daunting, but the prospect that you'll be eating elephant omelettes, elephant stew, elephant fricassee, elephant goulash (you get the idea) day in and day out for months. I have no suggestions, I'm hoping you do.
ambiguity: One of Trena's mantra. I'm OK with this.
flexibility: You know, I think this goes hand-in-hand with ambiguity. How can one cope with ambiguity if one is not flexible?

I LOVE Saldaña's description of analytic memos...It's where you get reflecive about your data and analyses, codes being "a prompt or trigger for written reflection on the deeper and complex meanings it evokes." (32). He then goes into detail on a few scenarios that he then gives examples for, mentioning that this process will also "generate codes and categories" (41).

Putting the Finish on Grbich

2011-02-14T14:12:00.001-05:00

Grbich, C. (2007). Qualitative data analysis: An introduction. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications. Chs, 14-17.

Grbich, C. (1998) Computing packages for qualitative data measurement: what is their real impact? Australian Journal of Primary Health - Interchange 4 (3): 98-104.

I'm definitely a "theory generation" type of person...theory directing seems a bit too "old-school" for me. Grbich's explanation resonated with me:"where you draw a range of 'theories' from the literature and from available theoretical ideas of relevance. Some of these will fall by the wayside as their explanatory power cannot be sustained in view of your research findings, while you may combine others with what is emerging from the data to form the basis for new theoretical explanations and models of practice." (186)

I was less impressed with the folksonomy she uses to discuss theory and its levels, but the small blurbs on different approaches to theory generation was nice.

I really don't know what to say about "Incorporating Data from Multiple Sources". It just rings false to me. If you have more or less subscribed to the notion that quantitative research in educational psychology places an emphasis on absolutely decontextualized cognitive states and appraisals at the expense of the interactive context in which cognition occurs, and then has the unmitigated gall to pass itself off as somehow more objective, scientific (see: superior), any talk of mixed methods sounds like a request to adulterate your otherwise pristine foray into ambiguity. I'm willing to be convinced otherwise.

I enjoyed the list and description of available display options Grbich put into Chapter 16. I can see referring to that while dissertating to see what would be the best fit for something I wanted to display.

Chapter 17...what to say about Chapter 17? At first, I was thinking that it simply was a bit too "SouthPacific-centric" for my sensibilities...and I still think that way about the layout of the software, most of which I either don't recognize or recognize as being out of date...which a simple nod to a group like the CAQDAS project and mention of some of the programs with staying power would have corrected. But then I noticed in the "concerns" section that (as some of my neighbors might say) Grbich has a dog in this hunt! (see 231) Was this whole thing just a straw-man argument?

Under the general concept of "tools constructed for a particular program must inevitably impact upon the data" (230), Grbich then opens up a five-page salvo (which, to my remembering, she has done nowhere else in this book) on CAQDAS programs, with volleys on the "framing" of knowledge (as if all knowledge wasn't framed), the "texturing" of reality (as if all reality wasn't textured) and its impact on knowledge, the "unnatural" structuring of collaborative communication in CAQDAS programs (as if there was a "natural" communicative structure) and, OMGG, REIFICATION (which she likely says with the same tone of voice as SINGULARITY). She then gives voice (minimally disturbed, I'm sure) to several researchers for a pastiched gripe session she frames as "users' comments".

If you look up her article, she at least admits that all data sets are disturbed by collection and framing, but that computer framing takes it up a notch by adding an additional frame embedded in the metaphors and ideology of the program. The SCT folk would call this "cultures of use", which they argue have existed in all technology from time immemorial, but of course, since we're talking about computers, and since Grbich might have a blind spot to SCT herself, all of the sudden CAQDAS framing is diametrically opposed to the center of a qualitative community of inquiry which values context, thick description and conveyance of participant voice..."minimally disturbed".

At this point I was having only a Tums moment. But then Grbich had to go and get shrill: "The way knowledge is constructed in our society is important, as is the hegemony of logic which determines which statements become knowledge. As human beings we have the capacity to create an inner representation of life which is multidimensional, complex and characterised by spontaneous reflexive actions. Processes involving segmenting and ordering data "ave the capacity to distance us as researchers, to limit perspectives, and to favour outcomes of homogenisation and standardisation. The tyranny of a system, however useful, which has the capacity to direct and simplify the construction of the views of researchers and ultimately those of readers, will thus always be problematic."

Excuse me, I need to go grab some Tagamet...fast.

Grbich 8-13

2011-02-07T16:18:00.000-05:00

Grbich, C. (2007). Qualitative data analysis: An introduction. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications. Chs, 3-7

Aarseth, Espen J. (1997). Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature. Johns Hopkins University Press.

Chapter 8: Content Analysis of Texts
I know that this kind of research would not necessarily be offensive to some flavors of grounded theory, but I can't help thinking to myself that this isn't REALLY qualitative research. If I have to know Cohen's kappa to do my research, then...I'm not doing qualitative research.

Chapter 9: Narrative Analysis
I found this to be an interesting and somewhat amusing read...perhaps a bit anachronistic. To say that "[t]he definition of what constitutes a narrative and how it should be treated has shifted and polarised over the past half century" (p. 125) and then to split that down structuralist/post-structuralist lines is soooo 20th-century. Of course, I'm sure that proponents of narrative analysis really don't want to deal with anything too recent, because they're in a sort of "death-match" with ludology right now. The narratologists want you to think that reading games as narrative is the thing to do, but I'm seduced by the thought that “to claim there is no difference between games and narratives is to ignore essential qualities of both categories.” (Aarseth 1997) I got a chance to listen to Espen Aarseth when he was here, and have pretty much abandoned narrative analysis as a viable tool for virtual world research. I sometimes have to think hard about if/how/when I would ever use "ludology" as an analytic tool, but they certainly do a good job of deconstructing narrative analysis to the point where you no longer have a taste for it. And yes, I get the irony that I've glommed onto a post-structural feature of ludology while pooh-poohing the binarity.

I had to chuckle when Grbich defined narrative. A nice slap in the face (albeit indirect) to the ludologists:

"How can we define a narrative? It is evident that the term can cover a wide variety of textual possibilities from fairy tales, myths and legends, paintings, movies, books and journalistic articles to personal autobiography, but not, however, instructions regarding how to do things." (p. 125, emphasis mine)

Chapter 10: Conversation Analysis
I'm not going to rehash much of what has been hashed on this blog over and over the past 3 years or so. I love CA. Gail Jefferson is not the be-all-end-all, just the base from which something else can spring, especially if you are doing anything multimodal. I like Shawn Rowe and Elinor Ochs. This type of transcription is not for the faint-of-heart, nor is it for those who easily decompose from listening to/watching the same 10 seconds over and over for an hour. Transcription IS analysis. Analysis IS transcription...

I was encouraged that Grbich at least made a nod to multimodality on 143-144.

Chapter 11: Discourse Analysis
Trena might remember how bent out of shape some of us got when we found out that our Discourse Analysis class was really a "cover" for a class on Discursive Psychology. It turned out to be the right call (for me at least, thankyouverymuchTrena), but I get just as steamed when it's something I like (say...Foucauldian) that gets virtually passed off as the whole. Yes, she does mention in the key points that DA "spans a broad field from formal linguistic approaches through Foucauldian analyses to cultural and communication studies approaches", and some of her passing examples point to it, but I just don't think it would hurt to have a small blurb on some major strains and how they differ...call me unreasonable.

This chapter would give you the impression that the limitations of Foucauldian analysis are the limitations of discourse analysis, when there is such a thing as feminist DA and critical DA. Seriously, Trena, if you had to write a NON-ENCYCLOPEDIC overview of DA, would it only be 8.5 pages long?

Maybe Trena needs to write a qual. book...

Chapter 12: Visual Interpretation
This is a perfect example of what I'm talking about. Small blurbs on major strains with examples. Brilliant. BTW...I highly recommend the Pink text...very compelling...especially the chapter where she raises awareness about the ethics involved in doing a visual ethnogrpahy....it certainly makes one think!

Chapter 13: Semiotic Structural and Poststructural Analyses
Semiotics is the one area where I think an understanding of structural/poststructural underpinnings is critical. How can one understand Derridian semiotics if one does not first understand Saussure and that history? I'm also convinced that it's hard to do certain types of analysis -- like discursive psychology or certain flavors of visual interpretation -- without understanding Derrida. But then, I'm from "across the street".

And I always dislike the criticisms...

"the deconstruction of the deconstructed text...can very quickly lead to meaninglessness." (180)
Yep.
"The lack of finite conclusions through the constant deferral of meaning also presents difficulties in terms of evaluation and policy decisions."(180)
True dat.
Are you done?
Your statements are informed...(recite the mantra and stick in the appropriate vocabulary while pouring yourself another bowl of Foucault Flakes)...

Facebook: The New Symbolism?

2011-02-02T18:08:00.000-05:00

Facebook est un temple où de vivants piliers
Laissent parfois sortir de confuses paroles;
L'homme y passe à travers des forêts de symboles
Qui l'observent avec des regards familiers.
— shameless appropriation of Baudelaire's Correspondances

Catching up on my blog reading gaps, I unearthed an awesome piece from danah boyd on social steganography. I think many (if not most), people do this...a lot. I've done it on FB and on the blog. Different communities attach different meanings to different snippets of pop culture. You could throw up a reference and a YouTube video and be directly addressing 1, 2, even 3 of your several discourse communities. If someone is able to consistently decipher the message of a particular discourse "channel" they are welcome into the community. If not, tant pis.

Do you find yourself doing this at all? I personally find it to be a more entertaining and even easier way to channel messages than messing with Privacy settings.....

Dad Loves His Family

2011-02-02T16:41:00.003-05:00

I fell upon my favorite duet this week:

I always imagine the story behind it to be heartwrenching. It was written for Betsy Asher, the wife of the album's producer, Peter Asher. They were apparently in the throes of an ugly divorce, and the song was meant to convey Betsy's emotional vulnerability during this time. But you have to remember that JT and JD were also in the throes of ugly breakups . So you essentially have three guys producing a song that had to be like constantly picking at painful emotional scabs. Painfully cathartic, perhaps. But painful nonetheless.

I can only fathom what is going through JD's mind about the "Faithless Love" of Linda Ronstadt as he is singing this song. I think JT's story is even sadder for me. I'd like to think that he saw his music as therapy...as medicine. He married someone who loved music. But when you have a family, you no longer live in a vacuum (not that you ever did, but families will make that more pronounced). Carly Simon seems to have chosen to sacrifice supernova status, to settle for being a star, and to spend time with her family. She was understandably upset with JT for placing a priority on the work of the music career, as opposed to spending time with the family. She gave him an ultimatum: cut back on the work, or it's over.

I can only imagine what a wrenching decision this was for him! If your experience is that your well-being is wrapped up in a particular flavor of creativity, then any choice you make is going to be painful. His ultimate answer was in the title of the album: Dad Loves His Work. A year later, she got the house and the garden, he got the boys in the band...

I'm just the opposite. While such a decision would be likely just as painful (because I love what I do) I would boot it all to the curb to keep the family, because my experience is that my well-being is wrapped up in the creativity I make, find and foster at home.

Of course, no one wants to make that decision if they can avoid it. As a result, there have been and continue to be sacrifices to afford me the opportunity to fulfill some part of my reason for being. But those sacrifices go both ways...fortunately, technology has allowed me to make those tradeoffs easier to bear and manage. But that is a part of my life that I never get to shut off, and that is an arrangement that I have made.

I respect people that make the conscious choice to compartmentalize their lives. I have made a conscious choice not to be able to compartmentalize mine as much, and during times of major life events, I commit all sorts of breaches of etiquette, and might even come off as downright impolitic at times. But the most important discourse community I belong to knows that they are the most important discourse community. Let the consequences follow....

Cognitive Dissonance, and Thoughts on Grbich 3-7

2011-01-31T13:39:00.000-05:00

Grbich, C. (2007). Qualitative data analysis: An introduction. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications. Chs, 3-7

Did anyone catch the introduction to Part Two? Grbich is now the second person I've heard espouse something close to the "spotlight theory" I described earlier, which (to my ears) sounds diametrically opposed to what we're discussing as a group:

"Although these procedures have a strong historical attachment to the design approaches within which they originated, they are flexible entities and can be lifted out, used and adapted to suit the needs of individual researchers in order to illuminate particular aspects of a research question." (p. 37)

Why does it sound in my mind like turfishness is being espoused in class, but then we read people like Grbich saying that "it is most appropriate that you hunt through the tools and procedures available to find the best one for the job at hand and, where none quite fits, to adapt several in order to provide answers to your research question"(p. 37)?

Is turfishness something endemic to certain approaches? And should those warning voices be ignored? I mean, I get that "as most analytical approaches have been strongly linked to particular forms of data collection and may also be underpinned by specific epistemological and conceptual or theoretical underpinnings, you will need to know what it is you are adapting in order to see more clearly what limitations and advantages may eventuate" (p. 37), but that doesn't make it impossible or even undesirable, does it?

This obviously needs to be the focus of some of my energies this semester, since I think that discursive psychology and cultural-historical activity theory can be blended in a way that will beneift my research. Maybe. Hopefully.

Classical Ethnographic Approaches / Newer Ethnographic Approaches

Understandably, these chapters don't even scratch the surface of the myriad approaches ethnography takes/wants to take. It's no wonder that I get the sense that all qualitative research (and some of the quantitative, too) is ethnography to ethnographers. Seriously. Phemonenology gets interpreted as a particular flavor of event analysis, discourse analysis is a fancy term for linguistic ethnography, etc. etc. I took the first half of Allison's year-long ethnography course just to see what all of the fuss was about. I wish I could have stayed for the entire year, if for no other reason than to be able to talk to ethnographers, not at or past them. I got exposed to a couple dozen ethnographic lenses (no kidding). If you think this is an avenue, I would suggest the class. These chapters will seem even more cursory than they are.

Grounded Theory

I really didn't like this section...I thought that the intro book (Creswell) Trena used when I took it did a better job walking through GT, or maybe it was Trena, I forget. I mean, Grbich does a fine job depicting the Glaserian / Straussian schism in GT, and even walks through some alternatives that I have not encountered. But I don't know how you talk about GT and not talk about the constructivist grounded theory of Charmaz or the situational analysis of Clarke, both of which have emerged as THE major alternatives to Glaser and Strauss.

Phenomenology

I have to admit that it is hard for me to conceptualize "doing" phenomenology, and not for the standard/obvious reasons. When I was learning the concepts of phenomenology through some of Sartre's "nauseated" characters like Roquentin, I was trained to look at how Roquentin (or his reader) was able to recognize "bracketing" as a socially-imposed construct, and the effects of ignoring or "unbracketing" things. Good times...I just have a hard time telling myself to go in the opposite direction, and why I would want to. But I am intrigued by the idea that the term lifeworld (Grbich defines as mundane daily occurrences...I prefer Husserl's world of immediate experience) springs from phenomenology, because I am noticing the term pop up at conferences now, and attached to projects that I would not think were phenomenological on their face. Might be worth a look-see....

Feminist Research

So far, this chapter seems WAY out of place. It's like we have had this wide-angle shot of all of these general theories, then we get a jarring zoom shot of a flavor of critical theory. It would have made more sense, IMHO, to have a section on critical theory, then to do a fly-over of critical race theory, critical gender theory (which would include critical feminist theory), etc. If the intention was to highlight one as an ensign for all, then just say so. I suspect that Grbich just knows a lot about critical feminist theory and felt compelled to include it, perhaps not realizing that omitting everything else would look eye-soreish to some. And don't tell me that feminist research doesn't have to be critical, that she may not even be going there. I may even agree that feminist research doesn't have to be critical, but that is NOT how Grbich is framing it (p. 96):

... there is inequality in our society which has been constructed along gender lines and this has left women as a group unequal with and subordinated to men in terms of socio-economic status and decision making power. Structural and cultural expectations and practices continue to reinforce these inequalities...current modes of knowledge disadvantage women by devaluing their ways of knowing and their forms of knowledge construction....highlighting the experiences of women through research and allowing their voices to be heard may go some way to making these inequalities more widely recognised and may also encourage political action to redress oppressive practices.

Which analysis approach to try?

I suppose that "ask me next week, when we get to discourse/conversation analysis" isn't an option...So...I guess it depends on whether we are trying to practice on something we know, or trying out something we don't, just to see....I like the appeal of the latter. It would be nice to "hook up" with others to try some of these out. I've been doing GT and ethnography, so I'm not terribly concerned/interested with those. I'd like to play around with phenomenology, but I'd like to work with KF, who has been doing it and could ge me a sense of the "rhythm" of doing phenomenology. I wouldn't know what to do if you just told me to go "do phenomenology" with the sample interview data...

We need more banners banning "banners" (aka RTB likes debunking myth)

2011-01-25T13:49:00.001-05:00

You would think we were talking about contraband or something. You can't carry them on UK aircraft, coffee shops are starting to discourage them, and college campuses more or less require their use but their faculty show little more than contempt for them. Laptops and other wireless devices are great tools for students to retain information and recover information for just-in-time use in the classroom, or an avenue to express opinion when that expression is not possible or discouraged in the classroom. Why are many faculty against their use in the classroom?

Ask them and they'll usually give you a one-word answer: abuse. They caught an unsuspecting soul on GMail or Facebook or eBay and feel the urge to save students from themselves. For the most part, I suspect that these students are saving themselves from Death by Formal Pedagogy, but that is a subject for another post. Please do us all a favor, take some Latin and infuse this maxim into your souls: Ex abusu non arguitur in usum...Students have virtual lives, it is infused into everything they do, and universities actually encourage it...don't think for a second that they will happily leave their virtual lives at the door of your classroom just because you have a problem with it.

More nuanced, tolerant yet concerned faculty at least have legitimate concerns of distraction and engagement. They'll tell you stories (is that not what anecdotes are?) of their personal encounters with distraction and engagement...the most recent tale I've been regaled with was about how maintaining eye contact is vital to good relationships in a class, and how this enables you to have effective discussions with others. This line of reasoning suggests that effective discussions and good relationships are not easily had without eye contact, and insinuates that laptops, by stealing your gaze, actually make you a less effective discussant.

Being an on-again, off-again adherent to the idea that the plural of anecdote is not spelled d-a-t-a, I decided to do some very cursory digging. Turns out that data might suggest that "laptop students" demonstrate higher participation,learning interest, motivation and pressure to perform than their laptop-challenged counterparts. (Trimmel & Bachmann, 2004) Furthermore, their creativity, social intelligence and mental stress were no better or worse than the pen-and-paper set. And while I've yet to find anything directly salient to the concept of gaze and communication, I did find some information that suggests that this view of communication might be...for lack of a better term...sexist.

There is a growing body of work that looks at the persistence of nonverbal social norms on virtual worlds. Nick Yee's "The Unbearable Likeness of Being Digital" discusses gaze and interpersonal distance (IPD) in both physical and virtual worlds. The literature review suggests that previous research has demonstrated gender differences in mutual gaze in the physical world. In particular, female/female dyads are more likely to exhibit mutual gaze than male-male dyads and mixed dyads. And males seem to have larger IPDs than females, with male-male dyads having the largest IPD, and female-female dyads having the smallest IPD. This is all superfluous until you get 5-10 students and 1 professor around a seminar discussion table. In comes the Equilibrium Theory, where research has shown that there is a harmony between gaze and IPD. The closer we are put to each other, the more we avert our gaze to return to that equilibrium state. Given that the average IPD is 12 feet, with males trending larger and females trending smaller, taking away laptops is likely to have no effect on male students (and generally annoy them if they're IT Ph.D. students)

However, being ever-at-the-ready to extend the hand of compromise, I am toying with the idea of doing my part of breaking the "wall of laptops" by stowing mine away...and pulling out my iPad... >:-)

Philosophical Foundations

2011-01-24T23:49:00.001-05:00

Crotty, M. (1998). Introduction: the research process (Chapter 1) and Positivism: the march of science (Chapter 2). In The foundations of social science research: Meaning and perspective in the research process. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.
Grbich, C. (2007). Qualitative data analysis: An introduction. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications. 1/2
Willis, J.W.(2007). World views, paradigms and the practice of social science research (Chapter 1). In Foundations of Qualitative Research: Interpretive and Critical Approaches (pp. 1-26). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.

Pretty standard introduction(s) to the flow from ontology/epistemology to theory, methodology and methods. I'm not sure if the quantity was helpful...I'm thinking you should find one that resonates rather than take them all in. My $0.02.

I personally find it helpful to see the flow from epistemology to praxis, and not research praxis, the REAL praxis...we are educators, after all. Oddly enough, it sometimes helps me to better understand the research orientations. This comes from page 54 of Reiser and Dempsey's Trends and Issues in Instructional Technology (2007):

Now, Grbich talks about how "some design types occur in more than one tradition, while combinations of design approaches and traditions of inquiry can occur in the same study." This sounds a lot like what I've heard from a prominent ethnographer...the idea that methods are like spotlights trained on a problem...more spotlights are always better. And yet, methods seem to be the most "turfish" things...discursive psychology would want nothing to do with phenomenology, phenomenologists might cringe at critical methodologies. So, someone has some 'splainin' to do.....

The Mac App Store is Ruining My Life, or "I Want My Prezi on My iPad...NOW!"

2011-01-20T09:26:00.000-05:00

Recently, I got all excited about a geek-out morning I was going to have at home...I was going to finally update my MacBook Pro to include the Mac App Store, and I was going to put Prezi on my iPad! I mean, look at this!:

But first, the Mac App Store, then the creshendo to PREZI...

So, MacApp Store downloads like a charm...I download a few free apps. Like my iPod Touch, I provide my Apple ID to download said free apps. then the kids wake up, so I leave my computer to take care of breakfast so I can return to finish up and move on.

...I return, and my 3-going-on-18-y.o.-mix-between-Tim-Tebow-and-Sheldon-Cooper son, Simon, is on my computer, gleefully purchasing software! Forty dollars worth, to be exact. Worse yet...software that I already own.

I know it is a long shot, but I decide to open a complaint with PayPal, in the hopes of getting Apple to show some mercy, and perhaps to take to heart a couple of my suggestions. I understand the draw to have your Apple Account always on with your iPod Touch or iPad...you can close them, put them away if needs be, and then whip them out and be downloading in seconds. But I had just learned the hard way that this may not be the best of ideas for a desktop computer... that perhaps Apple might add an extra layer of security (or at least have the option available) for those of us with kids that can secret away cell phones to call Shanghai or install most of a Sesame Street game on a momentarily unattended computer without assistance.

Of course, this epistle takes the time I would have spent downloading and playing with "PRRRRRREZI FOR THE IIIIIPAAAAAAD", so I have to wistfully pine away until the following week, when I can carve out some time at work to play with it.

The time FINALLY arrived, and I prepared myself for Prezi nirvana. I opened the App Store on my iPad, hit the chartreuse INSTALL button on the Prezi app page, and plugged in my Apple ID. The wait seemed eternal, but finally, there was some motion on the screen...

"Your Apple ID has been disabled."

It was like Richard Collier looking at the anachronistic penny that sealed his fate to never again see Elise McKenna.

Email: no luck.
Phone: So very sorry to not be able to assist me.

I'm trying again today, hoping against all hopes to reach someone in Cupertino. Only Cupertino can save me now.

How about a fresh cup of hypocrisy to start the day?

2011-01-20T08:15:00.000-05:00

Civil discourse, indeed:

Politicians could at least feign effort. They make this too easy.

~~It's like shooting fish in a barrel.~~
~~It's like taking candy from a baby.~~
~~They leave themselves wide open for potshots.~~

You all live in glass houses, okay? Enough said.

Reflections on Becoming a Qualitative Researcher I: Lovitts

2011-01-17T00:02:00.002-05:00

Lovitts, B.E. (2005). Being a good course-taker is not enough: a theoretical perspective on the transition to independent research.Studies in Higher Education30(2), 137-154.

Killing for recognition: Perhaps this rankles because Tucson and the mundanity of shrill rhetoric from all corners of life got under my skin this week, perhaps it is the perceived and unspoken need of scholars in the social sciences to pathologize the nonpathological. Did Lovitts feel this was needed to grab my attention? Did it add anything to the strength of the argument? Or does it actually harm more than help? I can already tell I'm going to have to compartmentalize this section so that it doesn't cloud how I take in the rest of the article. This introduction, however a propos, seems gratuitous.

Introduction: This all sounds about right, and I know that Trena and I have had discussion if not discussions about this very phenomenon. It happens to the best of us...and I speak from experience. I don't think every instance of non-completion can simply be attributed to this, but I think the article touches on other areas that suggest other reasons that are more nuanced. Coming at this from a praxiological lens, I always wonder where teaching, course-making ends up in these discussions. Many of "us" come from the teaching ranks, thinking that the doctoral education will enable us to learn how to better stand as an alma mater to our students. Well, if "the central purpose of doctoral education is to prepare a student for a lifetime of intellectual inquiry that manifests itself in creative scholarship and research" (138), how does this translate to praxis unless our research and scholarship deals with the scholarship of teaching?

The nature of the critical transition: Did 140 speak volumes..."The little research that exists on the transition to independent research indicates that the transition is affected by programme organization and structure...some transitions are ‘highly structured, with clear benchmarks; others are more informal with loose or shifting criteria'." It would be interesting to see how those working in qualitative research fare...hard to say. I'd like to think that, being drawn to a type of research where one becomes comfortable operating with high amounts of ambiguity would tend to make this group as a whole more successful. But I could see where the failure rate is even higher due to the more informal nature....

What is creativity?:It "inheres in the relationship the individual has with the domain and its gatekeepers."...So it really IS who you know...otherwise, how would you stumble upon "graduate faculty’s implicit standards" that are critical "to help guide students to higher levels of performance" ? And here is another thought that hit me as very true, especially given my experiences as of late: "graduate students and their work should be judged relative to the student’s capabilities and not a universal standard...a student’s ability to produce a dissertation that establishes a new conceptual framework is often a function of the state of the domain at the time the student is in graduate school." I think that if you happen to be in the right place at the right time reading the right people...you become a rock star. Research and scholarship as surfing: someone with equal or superior intelligence that hits the stage when a wave has already crested is left to make do, and try as one might, will never be as cool as the mediocre hipster who fell upon the monster wave.

Six resources for creativity and their role in graduate education: I fixated on the section concerning intelligence, and particularly the idea that "everyone has a combination of three types of intelligence: analytical, creative and practical." (143) If we agree that there is an "overemphasis on analytical intelligence in primary and secondary education, and even undergraduate education" (144), then this would be an appropriate place to begin pathologizing...it is nonsensical to think that a doctor would recommend a triathlon to someone with monster arm muscles but atrophic leg and core muscles...at least not without a protracted and intense relationship with a physical therapist coming first to bring all required muscles up to a par for the demands of a triathlon. Bad analogy perhaps, but does it not seem that society values analytic intelligence to the detriment of the others, then laments over the the fail rate of Ph.D. programs, and wants to pathologize the student instead of the system?

Jogging for paranoiacs!

2011-01-12T22:26:00.000-05:00

I happen to live in a subdivision where the roundtrip distance between my house and one backroad outlet is exactly 5K, and the roundtrip distance between my house and the second backroad outlet is exactly 10K. There are hills, inclines, it's away from the hustle and bustle of the city...makes for a perfect run, right?

Yeah, if I had a death wish. In the day, you have to leave one ear out of the music zone to protect yourself from crazy inattentive drivers who are absolutely positive they are the only ones out on that road. Night? Just add to the aforementioned the need to light yourself up like a Christmas tree, which invites a whole different set of problems stemming from attracting the local fauna to yourself.

FINALLY it looks like someone is reading my mind. Looks like Panasonic and Nordic track are hooking up to give me the scenery and workout variation without courting danger:

It looks like they are using the 3D and Street View power of Google Earth for eye candy, while adjusting the intensity of the treadmill to match your chosen terrain.

Sure, I wouldn't be able to virtually run my route (Google's Street View people zipped right past my neighborhood, apparently), but I think running circles around the Arc de Triomphe is an acceptable second....

Il me restera...

2010-09-22T12:07:00.000-04:00

I'm forcing myself to use this venue to be more reflective, and it's a good time of year to be reflective. it's funny how there seems to be a not-so-coincidental congruence of events around this time of year. For some reason (autoethnography, perhaps?) we are to bring in mementos today. I can honestly say that, for me at least, mementos aren't mementos until the signified is gone. Before that, they're just things that you normally don't even give a second thought to. There's only about three things I have in this world that were born as mementos, because we knew they would be long before they were made. A Photo CD, a DVD, and those cool clay impression cases... not quite sure what they're called. The case with the footprints will never leave the house... I have a copy of the discs. After all these years, I don't mind perusing through everything as an individual... I think of the happy moments I was able to have with such an amazing soul. For some reason, sharing them beyond myself is like picking at old surgery scars... painful, demoralizing, and usually absolutely unnecessary. Maybe today will be different... maybe not.

Jean-Jacques comes to mind..."Il me restera...des rêveries sucrés, d'autres amères, et le mal au coeur de tems en temps...Il me restera des souvenirs...des visages et des voix, et des rires" and these "babioloes...que je ne jourrais pas jeter"

Is this where I am headed?

2010-08-24T12:26:00.000-04:00

You know, I have heard mentors and collegues say or dance around the same thing I read this weekend in Goodall'sWriting the New Ethnography. Is this where I am headed? To take some poetic license with the NLT, what do I benefit if I gain tenure but lose my own soul? Is anything worth more than my soul?

This goes out to all my tenure hounds who give up X (writing, praxis, whatever) for the title:
(Oh, no.....song stuck in my head now)

It's about time we had our own song
Don't know what took so long
Cause nowadays it's like a badge of honor
To be an associate professor....

______________

"I received the official letter one afternoon late in May. A surprising thing happened. I opened my tenure letter, saw in the first line that I had been granted tenure and was promoted to associate professor, and found myself incapable even of forcing a smile. Instead, for a long, suspended moment, I stood there with the letter in my hand and a sense of loss in my heart. The humid air was as thick as syrup, warm and sticky as the road to hell, and perfectly still. I looked down at the letter and read the words again, as if maybe I had missed something on the first reading, something that would make this moment feel good. That didn't happen. I had come to a desired destination, but I wasn't happy about it.

Why? The question was my own. Its echo, in that suspended moment, defined my life.

The answer did not take long in coming to me. Every thing I had done to win tenure, every word I had written to gain a promotion, no longer seemed worth it to me. I had won a place in academe, but had lost my soul."

How Long Has This Been Going On?

2010-08-18T21:17:00.000-04:00

Apparently, thirty years!

Is this a service that everyone enjoys but us poor Amurkins, or is this a Brazilian phenomenon?

A very cool idea. I guess, in a sense, that textbook companies are testing this out for foreign languages. I know of a few companies who could use a call or two when they make their signs...

My question made me think of Ace...

The World is Stone

2010-05-17T22:28:00.000-04:00

Every once in a great while, I feel the full effect of the down side of what Dean Dad rightly (IMHO) dignifies. It really is hard, and sometimes it is harder than others. Case in point:

Today, I realized that the kids had opened up my car the night before to look for something (turned on the interior lights to find said item), and did not shut the door tightly, resulting in a dead battery as I turned the ignition as I headed out the next morning, only to realize that I wasn't going anywhere quickly...
When I got to my office-not-really-only-for-the-summer-former-dorm-room, I still had no ethernet connection and the wireless was misbehaving, so I had to pack up and move my office to the library.
My IRB (my first one solo, mind you) came back from my advisor looking like it had been through the metaphorical shredder, which I appreciate, but I know it frustrates her and makes her wonder why on earth she puts up with me, because she has it coming at her from all sides, too. I'm usually just another thorn in her side, another brick in her wall...if only I could be the perfect advisee...
I need to spend some serious time teasing out theories and figuring out what bloody lens I'm using on what is arguably a research project that could propel my career, but that requires time, silence, and some lucidity. I can never seem to find a space where I get all three at once. On a beau tout avoir... Really, I can barely manage to eek out 2 of the 3. Understandable, perhaps. But nothing can be done about it, expectations cannot be lowered at this level, I get it...believe in it. Still easier said than done.
Summers are supposed to be calm and serene, so that a research project doesn't seem so daunting. Of course, the summer that I throw my hat over the wall would be the summer that I get dislocated, thrown into a major course hybridization project, and a host of other good problems, good any other summer but this summer.
Of course, the feeling of undeserved honor leads to previously expressed feelings of imposterism.
Ma cherie amour doesn't ask me to do at lot for her during work hours, but she has the uncanny knack of asking when I'm up to the gills in meetings and just can't, which then frustrates her and makes her wonder why on earth she puts up with me (are we sensing a theme here yet?)
Of course, this IRB really needs some time, love and tenderness this week as to not cause the advisor any more grief, storm und strang, but...I have a friend coming in as a consultant on the aforementioned hybridization project, and she'll get my undivided attention for the next 2 days...
I have a 16-page prospectus and several hundreds of pages to read in association with the aforementioned undeserved honor...and about 1.5 weeks to do it.
I don't know who is more excited to see me get around to finishing, ma cherie amour, the kids, my advisor, or me!

So, I was doing my old-school mini pity-party cum pick-me-up virtual self-abjection via music....Le monde est stone was seeming particularly fitting today. Today was a light day, the Celine Dion version was sufficient. I like the Garou version better, but it's a little heavier...gotta be a cry-worthy bad day to put this one on. Today, I was resonating with the third stanza:

J'ai plus envie d'me battre
J'ai plus envie d'courir
Comme tous ces automates
Qui bâtissent des empires
Que le vent peut détruire
Comme des châteaux de cartes

For you poor French-deprived souls, there really is no way to translate this and do it justice. Yes, it can be translated...that doesn't mean one understands it or catches the lyric ennui. I always hope, though, so I was rooting around, and I had no idea so many people had taken on this song! And Cyndi Lauper? really?

This is my least favorite version of the song (big surprise), but actually, this song kinda works for her. Doesn't hurt that Tim Rice worked on this. Still lose 90% of the awesomeness of the text in translation, but it's still a good song.

Oh, BTW, I have divorced my FB page from Blogger, because I really think I should leave this for people who seek it out, not foist it upon the innocent! Because it is about to gear up again as a very therapeutic corner of reflexion for me......

I'll try to be more prolific....

Now THIS Rosetta Stone, I would buy!!

2010-03-17T11:32:00.000-04:00

I'm fascinated and slightly unnerved all at once...It may be as close as I ever get to getting "chipped" (and you all know I'd do that in a heartbeat)...

Basically, I can purchase a basic data tag for around $225 from Objecs, where I can then embed up to 1,000 words of prose about myself in the third person for when I am gone. Then, when the tag is installed on my tombstone, any RFID-enabled phone (think future iPhones) can scan the tag and read the embedded information. Right now, I could have a memorial story and a photo, but who knows what the future could hold (movies? books?). The tag's internal microchip will use the RFID phone's own magnetic field to power up just long enough to let the phone read the data, so in theory, the company claims that the tags should last at least 3,200 years.

Honey, add this to the post-mortem checklist!

Online News Readers don't want to pay for news online

2010-03-15T21:43:00.000-04:00

Newspapers think the new business model is to "digitize" the old analog business model. Good luck with that...

Diacritical Marks for your iPhone / iPod Touch

2010-02-15T09:40:00.000-05:00

Who knew holding down the keys could bring you so many options?

Nothing is Original Anymore!

2010-01-14T12:37:00.000-05:00

1232: .ii. demoiselles mout mignotes, qui estoient en pures cotes et trecies a une trece, fesoit Deduiz par grant noblece em mi la querole baler; mes de ce ne fet a parler come eus baloient cointement: l'une venoit tot belement contre l'autre, et quant eus estoient pres a pres, si s'entregetoient les bouches qu'i vos fust avis qu'euss 'entrebessoientou vis. Bien se savoient debrisier. (see the manuscript page!)

2002:

Go see "An Open Letter to Joshua Kim"

2010-01-11T20:46:00.000-05:00

AKA "The generalist/specialist smackdown". OK, not really....

How the NMAP Made RTB Reflexively Cry

2009-11-13T10:24:00.002-05:00

NMAP: "I'm kind of tired of people claiming that academics and researchers are trying to 'tell practitioners what to do' - when nearly all of us these days who are researchers WERE and still ARE also practitioners. Why is the assumption that we don't listen to practitioners? That we have no real world experience ourselves? That practitioner knowledge should automatically trump theory?"

RTB: IMHO, the problem is that researchers DON'T tell practitioners what to do. Researchers in general do a lousy job of making their research findings praxiologically transparent. We talk at them, not to them. But we can't blame researchers for that...academe does not reward it. Consequently, the job often falls to some intermediary (for CALL@UTK, that would be me). But then the intermediaries get "uppity", want to try their hand at changing the world, only to find out that the only one changed is themselves. You teach, but are no longer a "teacher". You practice, but are no longer a "practitioner". You are a researcher...a new member of a particular flavor of cognoscenti. It is a position I will never be comfortable in...but I could never go back. It is a position in which there is no room for apathy because intense ambivalence fills every available bit of space. I lack the words to reflect on this at a 'meta' level, but images flash in my head...the poor/fortunate man freed from Plato's Cave is one. But for those of you who are closet fans of Cyrano de Bergerac, perhaps you will understand when I tell you that the image that resonates with me like a massive earthquake is the Comte de Guiche as he reflects on his life after becoming a Duc. I can totally see me playing this out in a decade. For those of you qui ne parle pas très bien le français, perhaps taking his reflective lines from the English edition and inserting myself into them somehow will help you understand. All I ask in return is that you send me a little something to give voice to my tension. A little theory-as-therapy, palliative philosophy. Even a citation will do...I know my way around a library:

(walking from Claxton to the Library)

RTB (AS THE FUTURE NMAP) (speaking of a teacher): Ay, there is one who has no prize of Fortune!--Yet is not to be pitied!

THE TA (with a bitter smile): But Dr. Berchot...

RTB : Pity him not! He has lived out his career, free in his thoughts, as in his actions free!

THE TA (in the same tone): Dr. Berchot!

RTB (haughtily): True! I have all, and he has naught;. . .Yet I am proud to shake his hand!

(Waving to a colleague): Bye!

COLLEAGUE: I'll go over with you.

(RTB waves goodbye to the TA, and goes with the colleague toward the ramp.)

RTB (pausing, while the colleague goes up the ramp):
Ay, true,--I envy him.
Look you, when life is full of scholarly success
--Though the past holds no action foul--one feels
A thousand self-disgusts, of which the sum
Is not remorse, but a dim, vague unrest;
And, as one mounts the ramp of scholarly renown,
The NMAP's leather wheeled briefcase trails within its wheels
A sound of dead illusions, vain regrets,
A rustle--scarce a whisper--like as when,
Mounting the ramp to the sidewalk, your leather wheeled briefcase
Sweeps in its path the dying autumn leaves.

Flavors of Discourse Analysis Questions One Might See in "Misty Mountain Hop"

2009-11-09T21:28:00.001-05:00

Discursive Psychology: "Why don't you take a good look at yourself and describe what you see..."

Progressive Discourse: "And baby, baby, baby, do you like it?"

Now Spreading the Prezi Love

2009-11-05T11:25:00.002-05:00

I have never considered myself a PowerPoint hater...I use it at conferences, I'd like to think I can make a pretty dynamic PPT, and putting them on Slideshare for others has proven popular, at least I have a decent hit count. I work at a university where I get MSOffice for free, and while I have largely moved to Google Apps, I remain relatively content with PowerPoint, and haven't had much desire to move from it.

So what on earth would come along to make me tell you that I WILL NEVER MAKE ANOTHER POWERPOINT AGAIN?

Can I just say how much I LOVE Prezi? It's like having a table onto which you can dump the contents of your brain (and your document folders), arrange and rearrange your content, and then add a path to which you are not beholden to stick...jump (or let others jump) around as you/your audience please/s.

And again, 100MB of free space to create...the price is right! AND...once I have perfected my Prezi, I can download a self-contained Flashapp presentation that plays nice with any computer I use....or link out to it...or embed it wherever I like embedding things....

I like this one so much, I'm likely to upgrade this one to take advantage of the offline creator for use in our faculty development center.

Please share with me your Prezi stories...I can't be the only one out here who is smitten with this app!

Hey, you in the Ivory Tower: the Technology Gap is Real!

2009-11-05T10:39:00.001-05:00

Do you really still think Prensky has been debunked?

Think again:

Use by Students and Faculty Members of Various Technologies in Conjunction With Education

Tool	Students	Faculty Members
Laptops	84%	69%
Course management systems	77%	60%
Social networking	52%	14%
Open source applications	31%	12%
iPod / MP3 player	31%	8%
Wikis	28%	11%

Hope and Hype is Always Better Than Hate

2009-11-05T09:57:00.001-05:00

Remind me never to apply for a position at the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee. With a cyberstructure researcher who hates cloud computing and a CIO who hates Twitter, can you imagine how well RTB would fare there?

My favorite observation from the site (made me think of something Dr. Counts would say...which then made me cry):

...academics remain enormously hidebound about social utilities. I routinely hear academics who have never laid eyes on Twitter or Facebook dismiss them with would-be clever put downs based on sheer ignorance. Such people sound like nothing so much as medieval scribes grousing about the advent of movable type.

Spreading the Dropbox Love

2009-11-04T09:32:00.001-05:00

Thanks to J. for turning me onto Dropbox, the 2nd free app this week that has radically transformed how I work (more on that later). My files are now always in sync on my PC and Mac (even on my iPod Touch!), sharing folders with friends is easier, I have my critical documents backed up OFFSITE, and since Dropbox has a 30 day undo history, it's even RTB-proof! It has saved me from stressful situations on several occasions this week...and I've only had it for a week!

And did I mention that it's free? 2GB of storage...free! (Actually, 2.25 GB if you use the links in this post!)

And since I know that the NMAP loves the CommonCraft "In Plain English" YouTube Series, I thought she'd appreciate that they were commissioned to craft the Dropbox promotional video:

Save yourselves. Get Dropbox. Friends don't let friends use flash drives.....(can you believe we're "past" flash drives already?)

Questions about Sneijder & te Molder (2009)

2009-10-29T19:41:00.001-04:00

"Normalizing ideological food choice and eating practices. Identity work in online discussions on veganism" Appetite 52 (2009) 621–630.
(I'm looking at p. 623)

"In the first fragment, participant Anne, who categorizes herself as a novice by the activity of introducing herself..."

Perhaps I'm the only one who finds this observation problematic, but it seems to me that Anne could very well have been lurking on the forum for a year or more for all anyone knows. Not sure the activity of introduction categorizes one as a novice the way Sneijder & te Molder want you to think. Seems to me like there was other data in Anne's transcript that would have made a stronger case for her being a novice (as a vegan or as a member of the online community) than the fact that this was an introduction.

"The analysis was performed on the Dutch materials. It informed the translation to the extent that it was designed to capture the social actions found by the researchers in the data. In line with discursive psychological practice to ensure as much transparency on data and analysis as possible, the original Dutch postings are also made available to the readers."

I think this was well done...and makes my argument that "in line with discursive psychological practice to ensure as much transparency on data and analysis as possible", original video and audio recordings should also be made available to the readers in other research projects....

A free APA 6R after all.....

2009-10-28T09:54:00.000-04:00

Thanks to the American Psychological Association for FINALLY listening to their PR people and doing the right thing (which you should have done, oh, say....WEEKS ago!).

I {heart} James Gee

2009-10-22T23:36:00.001-04:00

Was tooling around on Edutopia and found this:

Nowhere does this ring more true than in the language classroom, IMHO. Great stuff!

Not sure you want to want to invest 12 minutes yet? (shame on you!) Check out Shiv's blog for a breakdown...should give you the motivation to take a crowbar to your planner and find the time.

RTB Likes "Promoting Confusion in Educational Psychology"

2009-10-21T23:06:00.002-04:00

Casie, no need to skewer rjmr...I've got it. Better yet, I hired a hit-theorist:

Fenstermacher, G., & Richardson, V. (1994). Promoting confusion in educational psychology: How is it done? Educational psychologist, 29(1), 49-55. (The Bereiter Stuff is on pp. 50-51)

I try to do a bit of irritating condensation, of course...(sometimes in medias res...) The bullets are mine. Anything in medias res is tagged as mine.
We tease you because we love you,bro!

(now there's a great example of a productive "non-progressive" discourse!)

Progressive discourse = Bereiter's attempt to graft behaviorism/cognitivism to postmodernism:
- "Bereiter deserves praise for his honest and straightforward effort to work out the implications of postmodern thought for his own conception of what is involved in doing educational psychology. This exploration has, it seems, moved his thinking away from the behaviorist and cognitive theories of learning for which he is well known toward a conception of scientific method that places empirical warrant within a discourse community."

Progressive discourse = Bereiter's attempt to impose the hegemony of research/science on education/praxis:
- "There are still signs in his article, however, of a conception of theory into practice that promotes the authority of some (i.e., researchers and theorists) to prescribe the practices and thought processes of others (i.e., teachers and students). This continues a long tradition in educational psychology that assumes that educational reform is a linear progression from the development of formal knowledge by researchers to the adoption of principles from this research by teacher-consumers."
Progressive discourse = Bereiter's attempt to "put lipstick on a pig":
- "In accommodating to the postmodernist view, Bereiter redefined the scientific method as a commitment to progressive discourse. This allowed him to maintain a sense of scientific progress — a position at odds with postmodernist thinking — while accepting the postmodernist position on the impossibility or irrelevance of a concept of objectivity in research. Locating the judgment of progress within a scientific community allowed Bereiter to reject a realist position that there is a reality external to an individual that may be apprehended through the scientific method-while moving the judgment of progress to a position that is external to the individual. For Bereiter, it is the discourse community that determines whether new ideas and their research evidence should be rejected or synthesized, or whether they should replace other ideas. He developed a set of prescriptions or entailments that ensure that the discourse process leads to progress..."
Progressive discourse = Bereiter's attempt to equate progress with consensus, and by so doing, silence heterodoxies:
- "Bereiter's commitment to discourse as the forum for the creation and judgement of scientific progress joins a strong and growing literature in social theory that proposes that dialogue, as engaged within certain sets of rules or entailments [<RTB>Let's call these discourses</RTB>], is our only hope for enlightened political and social decision making — as well as empowering educational processes...Unlike Bereiter's, however, most other sets of entailments [<RTB>discourses</RTB>] deal with the issue of equality of participation. Further, the goal of such discourse processes may not be consensus. Equating progress with consensus is precisely what postmodernists...would suggest leads to the hegemony that silences marginalized voices."

Progressive discourse = Bereiter's attempt to be "'da Man" for teachers, and to have teachers be "da Man" for students:
- "When Bereiter moves to the educational implications of his progressive-discourse theory, one can see why equal participation in the discourse is not one of his criteria. The concept of authority is strongly represented in his conceptualization of the discourse community classroom. The first authority is Bereiter, himself, who, as a learning theorist, developed prescriptions for teachers on the nature of the progressive-discourse classroom, and for the role of the teachers in such classrooms. The next authority is the teacher, whose role is to lead students forward by having them examine authoritative texts and other expert sources and come to common interpretation of their meaning. The teacher would also determine whether the discourse is progressive and would intervene if it were not. Thus, authority over the nature of the classroom discourse and the goals and role of the teacher resides in the theorist — Bereiter — and authority related to [<RTB>Insert your discipline here</RTB>] resides in the text, the teacher, and other forms of expertise."
Progressive discourse = Bereiter's attempt to impose a hegemony of knowledge, and by so doing, promoting inequality and marginalizing democracy:
- "Bereiter's article represents a provocative attempt to accommodate the subjective elements of postmodernism within a postpositivist approach to scientific method, but it ignores a most important issue in the postmodern thinking — the critique related to the hegemony of knowledge. By ignoring the concern that discourse communities may be undemocratic, Bereiter's approach would not appease the postmodern critics nor would it contribute to reducing the inequality present in the enactment of [<RTB>Insert your discipline here</RTB>]."

RTB throws down his keyboard and walks off à la Ralphie May........

Un pretendido discurso progresista?

2009-10-13T08:57:00.001-04:00

ROFL!

So, all you progressive discursivists...what about this one? Is learning occuring, or is this just nonproductive college hoodlums mocking the sacrosanct textbook (which of course we all know is the gold standard for learning)?

As seen on TV…

Thanks, Barbara!

Hold Off on Your APA 6th! - Inside Higher Ed

2009-10-13T08:30:00.000-04:00

Might want to wait until the APA gets it's act together on the new style guide.....

apa / 13 - Inside Higher Ed

Shared via AddThis

Todos somos impostores

2009-10-07T12:14:00.007-04:00

If you're feeling down, go read this post on Casie's blog, as well as the comments. Guaranteed to make you feel better.

Thanks, Casie.

There are, according to some, places where that imposterism can more easily be concealed... A bit of self-ironizing satire that still makes me laugh. No, I'm not "reclaiming the stereotypes that have harmed me and my community", whatever that means. Sometimes cracking jokes is just cracking jokes (now the video, I'd analyze!):

Philip Oakey: Discursive Constructionist avant la lettre?

2009-10-01T11:46:00.000-04:00

"Just looking for a new direction in an old familiar way…the forming of a new connection to study or to play"

"Well the truth may need some re-arranging…stories to be told…and plain to see the facts are changing…no meaning left to hold"

"And so the conversation turned…"

Progessive/Productive Or Non-progressive/Nonproductive?

2009-10-01T01:05:00.001-04:00

It must be exhausting, being an advocate for prescriptive DA...I imagine that those who live in a world of how discourse should be instead of how it actually is feel either like Don Quixote or the Cassandra of Greek mythology. I certainly don't have the stamina for it...besides, I think descriptive DA makes more sense. Given that Bakhtin sees discourse as ongoing and unfixed anyway, I'm sure he'd scoff at the concept of placing value judgments on discourse.

In that spirit, I'd like to pose a question: Is this discourse progressive/productive? Why/why not? If you feel it is non-progressive, how wide does your lens have to get before you see it as progressive, or does your lens never get to that point?

Inquiring minds want to know...

Happy (belated, dagnabbit) birthday, G'Ann!

2009-10-01T00:39:00.000-04:00

My wife reminded me today that I had forgotten G'Ann's birthday. Boy, do I feel like a heel. I even dug up and scanned literally EVERY picture I have of her to put on FB for the event. Don't know what happened. Really, what kind of a father am I?

Who let the doxa out?

2009-09-18T14:27:00.002-04:00

I may have the beginnings of some empathy for Casie's irritation at the festering sore that is the negotiation of definition. As the NMAP has stated elsewhere, "The more you start digging, the harder it gets to answer questions with much cohesiveness".

The more I align my theoretical lens with sociocultural and activity theory à la Lantolf and Thorne, the harder I find it as a researcher to conceptualize Platonic epistemology or even Platonic nomenclature (although a conversation I had with Dr. Barb this week showed me that one can espouse a rabid relativism and still believe in the Allegory of the Cave…I hope to blog about this sometime soon). I've found it harder to just bracket the classical rhetoric lately since I'm expposed to it in a Cultural Studies course, so I actually had to squint a bit at Casie's post.

While the binaries seem reasonable to what's left of my understanding of classical rhetoric, my SCT and Foucauldian ids were unsettled…Thorne is constantly reminding us that EVERYTHING is culturally mediated, even our "invisible" doxa attached to some cultural artefacts, which resonates with Foucault's desire to resist the epistemes in covert loci of power…the fundamental and pervasive assumptions that are "invisible to people operating within" a given society.

Then it hit me…I had read (a loooong time ago) Bourdieu's Esquisse d'une théorie de la pratique, and it was there that I saw a "repurposing" of doxa to position it in relation to discourse. The figure from the English translation is below:

To Bourdieu, doxa connote a society's taken-for-granted, unquestioned "truths". It reminds me a bit of the Wells article...on p. 111, the Matusov observations that "without some disagreement there would be no need to communicate", and therefore no discourse. Bourdieu describes it as what “goes without saying because it comes without saying”. Once the doxa are questioned, you have an "orthodoxy" or "dogma" which is resisted by one or several "heterodoxies" or "iconoclasms", which enters the universe of discourse.

So, I would arrange the binaries like this (today at least):

doxa (episteme) :: discourse

orthodoxy (dogma) :: heterodoxy (iconoclasm) ...[but it's all discourse]

I would bracket unfounded/founded and fact as valuations.

I'm not sure what to do with techne. As techne has more to do classically with performance and production than knowledge per se (like episteme), I'm not sure doxa is a good fit, because while there are some pervasive assumptions that "go without saying" in any techne, at some point those assumptions were challenged and were part of discourse. Aristotle uses the term endoxa to describe a "more stable" doxa because it was at one point challenged and discussed in the polis. So I guess I'd go with that (appropriated into Bourdieu's taxonomy, of course).

Yes, you can have techne without the Platonic episteme (let us hearken back to the NMAP's mental furniture argument....there is no "there" there). Techne seems to me a social construct that is negotiated like anything else.

[side note to the NMAP: how you can espouse the "no mental furniture" argument and not take "The Matrix" leap into free-fall relativism is beyond me...you are, IMHO, about as close to Sartre's "Roquentin" stance as you can get...let me know when the coffee starts discoursing with you...]

But I will admit to being troubled by episteme, because Foucault (being French, after all) seems to want the word to mean both doxa and what could perhaps be best expressed as "gestalt" or even "spiritus mundi". He seems to use the word to describe both a wider range of Discourse and the invisible assumptions held by the people within that wider range of Discourse.

I think my head is telling me it's time to stop blogging and start eating my lunch...

From "Discourse in Activity and Activity as Discourse"

2009-09-16T20:17:00.000-04:00

"[L]ook at the following transcript from a science classroom taken from Lemke (1990):"

Transcript 1: Carbon

Teacher: Ron?
Ron: Boron?
Teacher: That would be—That’d have uh . . . seven electrons. So you’d have to have one here, one here, one here, one here, one here . . . one here—Who said it? You?
Student: Carbon.
Teacher: What’s—
Students: Carbon! Carbon!
Teacher: Carbon. Carbon. Here. Six electrons. And they can be anywhere within those—confining—orbitals. This is also from the notes from before. The term orbital refers to the average region transversed [sic] by an electron. Electrons occupy orbitals that may differ in size, shape, or orientation. That’s—that’s from the other class, we might as well use it for review. (pp. 17–18, 20)

"Lemke explained that this is a conversation between a teacher standing at the blackboard on which a chalk Atomic Orbital Diagram is drawn. As the teacher talks, he gestures at the diagram and a periodic table hung on the wall. The drawing and table are more than mere props of the teacher’s and students’ dialogue, and they are more than mnemonic devices for the students. At the least, they serve as part of preparing contexts (Lemke, 1990) within which particular questions and statements make sense. When students miss these preparations, they might not even understand what is expected of them as interlocutors, much less the science content of the talk (Lemke, 1990). In terms of our discussion, the students are expected not only to learn to talk about atoms and their orbitals in the correct way, but also to recognize and use such diagrams and tables in the correct ways as well to perform adequate identities as science students. Because science talk is a gateway to further education as well as career choices, such simple routines as this one are important as apprenticeship activities. When we employ turn taking as the unit of analysis and fail to include any description of the activity that co-occurs with the talk and contextualizes it as part of the transcript, some parts of the talk become virtually meaningless to the analyst (i.e., pointing out electrons—“one here” or referring to the diagram “that’s from the other class”). If we are interested in how the mediational means (like diagrams), talk, and activity work together as a distributed system, with how both talk and action shape each other over the course of an activity, and thus with how people learn to use the linguistic and nonlinguistic stuff that makes up Discourse, then we need a different kind of transcript."

Rowe, S. (2001). Discourse in activity and activity as discourse. An introduction to critical discourse analysis in education / edited by Rebecca Rogers.

Unimportant and Unimpressive? Really?!?

2009-09-16T15:53:00.004-04:00

"...So what? Big fat deal. What's so great about long-held and politically powerful communities of practice anyway?..."

Brava. Spoken like a true humanities scholar.

Having had a true "near miss" (at times regrettably so à la Paul Simon) as a scholar of Old French Literature (with a postmodern lens, no less) and working in technology-enhanced language learning as a discipline, I feel at times like a humanities scholar trapped in a social sciences degree program, at times a social scientist trapped in the humanities. (cliché)Some of my best friends are humanities scholars(/cliché), others are social scientists. So when posts like this arise, I am truly torn. I don't know whether to cheer "w00t!" or shove a spoon down my throat à la Frank Zappa. I feel like I need to defend the humanities to my social science friends, and make my humanities friends aware of the plight some social scientists face as they strive to achieve the sugar-plum-fairy-and-gumdrops world the humanities scholars will for them…now.

Social science / Ed. folks (of which I consider myself an adoptee):

Humanities scholars really do love you. They're not "normally combative" or "obnoxious" (well, within their own ranks, they might be, but that's another post). You have taken philosophy and critical theory from which "their disciplines" are the "fount" and you have crafted qualitative tools to rival the quantitative tools of some of your colleagues, tools that both ask and answer questions that those quantitative tools cannot.

Never forget this one thing, though: try as they might, most humanities scholars are never fully able to escape the discourse of hubris in which they marinate, lodged within those ivory-tower disciplines...in fact, one might say that "the system" encourages it...the longer you are steeped in it, the more likely it is to become reified in your own scholarly activity, and the more likely you are to have your name memorialized on some obscure page of the MLA Website. Or perhaps to roam the halls of some ivy-covered building, with a throng of young acolytes hailing you as the next Stanley Fish. All I'm saying is "don't hate the speaker, hate the discourse!"

The discourse (at least our localized permutation of it) goes something like this (I've "unproblematized" it some to hasten this along):

We are Guardians (think Republic Book VII).Your "long-held and politically powerful communities of practice" are irrelevant. "Disciplinary quibbling" is futile. We wish to restructure your discipline(s) in a way that "refigures both educational practices and scholarly research". We will add our "more complicated relations" to your "reductive and/or incomplete methods and concepts". "Clamoring for disciplinary credibility" is futile. Your "rarefied and hegemonic" discourses are over. From this time forward, you will "assume that DA is a Science in its own right, as defined by practitioners in 'the field'".

Humanities folks (from which I consider myself an on-again, off-again expat):

Social scientists envy you at times. What other discipline could pull off a session at a medieval conference, perchance a dissertation, and a "shout out" in a popular biography around the topic of theorizing the male nipple? (we could argue about which discipline is really rarified, but to what end?).

Some of us want to move in interesting and new directions, but are hampered by the hegemonic (or at least problematic) position that quantitative methods hold in many of our disciplines. We learn how to explain what we "do" in qualitative research in terms that quantitative methodologists (dare I say...science) can understand, because we like graduating and we like tenure. We envy the wide-eyed counter-hegemonic abandon of your manifesto, but if we actually went about "deconstructing received boundaries" and castigating the "incompatible systems" under which we are often compelled to operate, we would get our dissertations (or worse, our tenure dossiers) placed firmly back in our laps. These discussions are important to us, because they will take place over and over again and the friction between the boundaries helps us to understand how to position ourselves. We're glad you don't have this burden. We do.

Some of us want to move in interesting and new directions, but are not convinced that your privileged discourse isn't just trading one hegemony for another:

We've been "quibbling" about what discourse is, what constitutes a legitimate "mode" of inquiry. We thought your vision was Gee's vision (that it is not enough to get just the words “right,” but also one’s body, clothes, gestures, actions, interactions,ways with things, symbols, tools, technologies and values, attitudes, beliefs, and emotions as well). Then we see this desire to conflate DA with Composition Studies, which, unmodified or undeveloped (or unexplained), invokes in most of us a discourse of privileging writing, which seems even more restrictive than rjmr at his most extreme moments. Not sure we're all interested in this avenue.
One of your own has been quite critical of the lens used here to position Composition Studies, which he characterizes as having "a lockstep, scholastic uniformity and, far from being comprehensible to the masses of teachers and students... seems calculated mainly to win prestige for composition theory by elevating it to the level of the most arcane (and now outmoded) literary theory; 'doing theory' now often has become a substitute for teaching writing, as it earlier became one for teaching literature." We get privileging your own discourse (don't agree, just "get it") but reject the desire to maintain or expand a certain theoretical hegemony to the exclusion of our praxiological concerns in general, or to something that we get hung up on, like foundational nomenclature.
You speak of DA as if it were a monolith ("DA as a method and product of inquiry", "DA is a Science...based on its...adherence to common method") with "disciplinary best-practices establishment". So, which DA are we talking about? DASP? CDA? Foucauldian DA? CA? The various flavors of linguistic DA? Emerging subdisciplines? What is the common method? Is there even a "common" method in DASP (the one we are ostensibly focusing on), and will I ever use it in my discipline? Which discipline(s) get to establish this "common method" and these "best practices"? Why can't every discipline use every flavor of DA, develop their own common methods and best practices as they evolve? What happened to the interdisciplinarity you were espousing? Or better, are these the kinds of questions you were hoping to get to rather than the ones that are, apparently, not a "big fat deal"?

I couldn't agree more with the desideratum for the speedy arrival of the sugar-plum-fairy-and-gumdrops world...but the praxis of academe is not one of speed. Forced to live in and with the shadows of Plato's Cave, I, for one, have considered our exchanges (both in class and online) to be anything but unimportant or unimpressive...quite the contrary. If there are some that wish to make that discussion a leitmotif for the course, who am I to say no?

Continuing the EPC531 Wordle meme

2009-09-13T23:35:00.000-04:00

χρηστομάθεια or ἀνθολογία?

2009-09-10T01:12:00.001-04:00

"It seems to me that the real task in a society such as ours is to criticize the workings of institutions which appear to be both neutral and independent; to criticize and attack them in such a manner that the political violence which has always exercised itself obscurely through them will be unmasked, so that one can fight against them." - Michel Foucault

Now, I'm not going to say that rjmr's reasoning is "faulty", but rather that it is "informed, or should I say misinformed, by the conventionalized positivist paradigms that center on such outmoded empirical notions as…" (OK, now even I'm getting sick of the "Deconstruction Breakfast Food Product." No more…I PROMISE…)

Shall we take a trip into the RTB "retrospective-stream-of-consciousness" rabbit-hole?

rjmr: "Within a discourse community if we are speaking of something of value which we need to define (for example we are both stakeholders), the opinions we have should not be flights of fancy."

RTB: Ummm…we all come into conversations adhering to discourses that inform our perceptions, none of those perceptions being the same (tot sententiae quot homines). Social construction of reality within a discourse community has less to do with defining meaning and more to do with negotiating meaning. And lest we forget, Wegerif (2006) posits that the source of meaning "is to be found not in the figures or in their backgrounds but in the difference between the two because it is the boundary around a figure that makes it exist as a thinkable thing." (p. 145) . Are you remembering this, kiddies? There _will_ be a quiz later….

rjmr: "We would hope that each contributing member of the community has done their part to be thoughtful and can back up their opinion using reason to the fullest extent possible."

RTB: Ahhh…nothing like the smell of fresh logocentrism in the morning! Could you please define reason for us?

rjmr "I heart the scientific method" medley:

Within the discourse community the definition (i.e. description of reality) that finally becomes accepted should be that which can best be defended by supporting scientific information…
As a condition of membership into the category science, DA must reach its conclusions in a certain way: it must have its own social-scientific method.
I would now define science using your phraseology: a field of inquiry whose claims exist in terms of reasonable support.
any two claims may be judged against one another by comparing their supporting evidence.
(In response to “Requiring your version of scientific, empirical evidence, without acknowledging other viewpoints, shuts down communication.") "No, it simply limits communication to that which can be supported. As noted by Casie, this happens all the time in academia. If you write a paper filled with unsupported ideas, it is unlikely to get published. Hence, communication is shut down.

RTB: OK, I think we get that you profess an objective epistemology, and that is certainly one way of looking at the world...can I share another with you?:

"Myths can be produced by the same sorts of methods and held for the same sorts of reasons that now lead to scientific knowledge"
"Competition between segments of the scientific community is the only historical process that ever actually results in the rejection of one previously accepted theory or in the adoption of another" -Thomas Kuhn

Let me elaborate…

On the level of [D]iscourse, the scientific method depends upon a negotiated set of skills within a community of practice and rests on agreement within those communities, so not only is the social determination of scientific knowledge possible in spite of the scientific method…the scientific method itself is a social construct, and the output from the scientific method is constructed knowledge, not discovered truth. The "truth" gets to be told by the "champions"… those who find themselves within the "dominant discourse" of the age.

Recent example: is Pluto a planet? It was 10 years ago…..

On the level of [d]iscourse, scientific experiments depend upon framing the terms of the argument, the kinds of questions one asks, and the hypotheses that are proposed which depend in large part upon one's relation to the object[s] of study. Seems pretty "squishy" to me (as opposed to Educational Research: The Hardest Science of All…).

So, in the end, the scientific method is just one discourse among many. You of course want to privilege your discourse, which is easy to do…science is a huge cash cow, and where there is money there is power. You have to know that there are other discourses that live to resist the one you want to privilege…that criticize the workings of the scientific community as neither neutral nor independent; that attempt to unmask the political violence which has always exercised itself obscurely through science in order to fight it…(before you think it, five names: Oppenheimer, Nobel, Kevorkian, Mengele, Rascher).

rjmr (in imagined response): "How do you compare two arguments before you? Or are they above comparison?"

RTB: This is a perfectly valid question for someone coming from an epistemology of objectivism to ask…but it is a question that rings false in the ears of someone coming from an epistemology of relativism, which may explain the lack of response.

Let's use your blog title as an object lesson.....

Chrestomathia is a fitting title for an objectivist: from the Greek χρηστός (better) and μανθάνω (learn or understand). It is used in philology to describe a book with a sequence of texts used as exempla, to demonstrate the "development" or "perfection" of a language over time. This fits in nicely, IMHO, with a scientific view of the evolution of scientific thought.

If I had created a blog from scratch for this course, I would likely have named it Anthologiai from the Greek ἀνθολογία from ἄνθος (anthos, “flower”) + λέγω (legō, “I gather, pick up, collect”). These were originally collections of small Greek poems and epigrams, because in Greek culture flowers symbolize the finer sentiments that only poetry can express. There need not be an overarching rhyme or reason to the inclusions, arrangement, etc...and if there was intent in any of these, it is of no matter...what matters is how the discursive community of practice receives and perceives them...how the scent of each flower adds to the bouquet, how they interact and resonate with each other and with the researcher. Bakhtin held that the meaning of discourse is not "reducible to the intentions of the speaker or to the response of the addressee but emerges between these two." (Holquist, 1981, pp. 429–430) Wegerif explains that "the way in which each generation of scholars re-visits and re-interprets textual fragments from ancient Greece is used by Bakhtin to illustrate his claim that there can be no final or fixed interpretation of an utterance."

Having had what I'll call a "near-miss" with a career in the hard sciences, I think I can empathize with the sentiment that this kind of investigation is not for everyone. One must be comfortable with loose ends, with ambiguity, with participation and the “holistic” view of things. Those who come from disciplines that have their roots in the traditional scientific method feel uneasy with research that relies on the personal factor in which the main form is socializing and the main instrument is the researcher. Hopefully, I've done my part to demonstrate that all research instruments are culturally mediated and that what social scientists do (my world view) presents a “picture of reality, of life as it exists in time and space” (Neisser, 1976, p. 2).

Postscript: On a completely different note (the note that sounds something like "I don't heart discourse that ain't talkin' or writin'), might I recommend Chapter 4 (entitled "Discourse in Activity and Activity as Discourse" by Shawn Rowe) in Rebecca Rogers' An Introduction to Critical Discourse Analysis in Education (2004).......

BTW, the answer to the question in the post title is "yes".

"Is there any way out?"

2009-09-04T10:24:00.001-04:00

NMAP: "I like the idea of various factions "resisting" whatever is dominant - but, of course, then the oppressed become the oppressor and before you know it we have myriad "disciplines" all screaming for relevance, making claims of importance, and proceeding to shove their own view of what is "important" and "true" down the next generations' throats. Is there any way out?"

...Not according to this clip (especially the Foucault part):

How Discourse Made the NMAP a Colonialist

2009-09-02T10:05:00.000-04:00

Everything is political, as "Pictures at a Conversation" illustrated quite well. And any discussion of how education "should" be necessarily ends in aporia.

Case in point: the NMAP seems to advocate for teaching education as a monolith (I'm guessing the NMAP would call it "utopian interdisciplinarity") while I advocate for a more granular application of general principles, or even that general principles don't often contextualize as well as the NMAP would like us to believe (which I'm sure the NMAP could call something totally different). Disciplinary relationships are tenuous...take CALL, for example. Even though ESL and FL CALL have been happily "married" for decades, at its foundation it is still a power struggle.

I'm reminded of a book by Adrian Holliday entitled The Struggle to Teach English as an International Language that shows that, if anything, disciplines tend towards becoming even more granular, not less. Holliday uses a discourse of colonialism to challenge "native-speakerism" and advocates for the divestiture in the ESL profession of what has increasingly become an outdated perception of language "ownership" by native speakers, and this as a way to include NNS as not only worthy lecturers of the profession, but a subset worthy of disciplinarity themselves.

It occurs to me that it would be easy (perhaps facile) to take the NMAP's "we are all educators" paragraph, which seems quite interdisciplinary/collaborative, and make it seem quite nefarious and even nativist by hijacking Holliday's discourse and applying it to "education". It could be argued that the NMAP espouses an "essentialist" view of education, a historical force rooted in colonialism, pressuring us into a kind of mindset that colleges of eduation have a monopoly on the proper characteristics of pedagogy, critical thinking, and so on, that reduces 'non-native' education colleagues to suit its own structures...devalues their realities; and ignores the way in which these realities resist the 'dominant' educational dialogue.

Yes/no?

Pictures at a Conversation

2009-09-01T13:42:00.002-04:00

Written on an LCD wall...Observed by RTB:

Concerned Student:

I’m torn.
I appreciate the chance to interact with people in other disciplines over things we discuss in class, but I’m concerned about the research in small groups, not only because people like to see how praxis plays out in their _own_ research field, but because there seems to be a lot of polarity about appropriate modes for research. ...I don’t see how that plays out to everyone’s satisfaction if the disciplines are so different that not only is there a gulf of transferability that could likely not be bridged ...but even basic assumptions of what constitutes “discourse” and “research modes” are diametrically opposed.

...I’m not sure whether the history of this proposal is simply the previous impossibility of creating disciplinary teams under the guise of disciplinary diversity or whether there really is a true belief and personal confirmation that this is for our own good. I’m willing to go on some faith, but I’m worried that I’ll end up dreading this research project (or worse, that my group will) especially when I know that there is a chance for some real synergy with some like-minded folks from a “3rd cousin twice removed” discipline...
If it were discussing / dialoguing / debating / anything but researching, you could put me with anyone and I’d be perfectly happy. I’m skittish about the research, because in the “real” world, you get to choose your research colleagues......

NMAP:

Here are a few clarifications/my take on the group assignment.

1. Calling this a "research study/project" was probably an overstatement on my part. I do want you to get practice analyzing data from a DASP perspective, but it is by no means a full study...I am also going to be somewhat prescriptive with how you approach the assignment (even though I haven't spelled that out yet.)

2. No one has IRB approval to conduct a study in this class, so it isn't like you are working on a "real" study in which the stakes may be higher regarding your concerns.
3. As far as I'm concerned, everyone in the class IS from the same discipline - education. Everyone is concerned with teaching and learning. Counter to how colleges of education tend to be organized, I believe that a lot of teaching and learning is teaching and learning, regardless of the discipline.
4. However, I completely agree that there are likely varying epistemologies in the class - and that's precisely why I wanted to group you with people OTHER than whom you are used to working with or with whom you share beliefs. This is particularly important when doing analysis from a DASP perspective - you want to identify all the possible angles, assumptions, beliefs going on in a particular conversation segment, and working with people you don't share a lot in common with can help with this.
5. You seem to be anticipating or creating problems where none may exist. You are assuming no one else will have an interest in multimodal data. It could be that everyone in your group will be quite interested in this, but of course it's up to you to pitch that to your group by enacting your best collaborative skills - building relationships, honoring each other's perspectives, listening to their ideas, being willing to be influenced by someone who may have an even better idea than yours. I will certainly encourage this kind of exploration.
6. I really wish the statement "in the real world you get to choose your research partners" was true. It's not. At all, actually, especially in this very interdisciplinary, collaborative research world that we live in. Even if you THINK you know what you are getting when you start to work with someone, you don't.

Concerned Student:

As an aside, can I just say that you rock! I know of very few NMAPs willing to engage in the dialogic process to the extent that you do...validating, responding to and challenging our positions when your "id" would most likely rather have a Steven Seagal moment with us.

Now, to some thoughts/reactions to your response:

1. The devil is always in the details...."somewhat prescriptive". And here I thought the DASP/constructionist definition was prescriptive enough. I realize of course that there is method in the perceived madness (just like we all did qual. a certain way to begin with, even if we wanted to "go boutique")...I'm just eager to jump off of the "one-size-fits-all" (was that not a leitmotif of the your response?) bandwagon and research how DA can fit/complement other research orientations I'm likely to have:

Vine, E.W. (2008). "CA and SCT: strange bedfellows or useful partners for understanding classroom interactions?" Discourse Studies, Vol. 10, No. 5, 673-693.

Levine, P. & Scollon, R., Eds. (2004). Discourse and technology: Multimodal discourse analysis. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press.

2. I'm not sure that (for me at least) it was a question of stakes. My position was that it would be more helpful (in my current understanding) to see how the praxis of DA plays out in one's_own_ research field. I understand the exercise in Intro. to Qual. of going outside the field to gain an experience free of some of the engrained notions one has about things, but I'm not sure that makes as much sense here, but I could see that rationale being valid.

3. I realize that you are coming at this from the instructional designer / subject matter expert POV, but I would argue that this is only working (and increasingly so) in the business world. You espouse a centralized view of instruction and pedagogy that is not only diametrically opposed to my point of view, but to the overwhelming view of higher education. Pedagogical and research environments in most institutions of higher education are decentralized to some degree, with greater decentralization in large research universities. Larger institutions with a significant research mission (such as ours) tend to emphasize disciplinary academic efforts in both instruction and research and place a great deal of authority at the department level. If we extend your argument, then we should have a universal methods course to teach pedagogy as a monolith, and cast off entire subdisciplines that have been devoted to the idiosyncracies of teaching and researching certain subjects. While I believe that there is room for interdisciplinarity to some degree (you have programs like film studies or Latin American studies, etc. that administratively codify this idea), even your own college is structured to reflect the reality that there are content areas, and that content areas have their own discourses and vocabularies and idiosyncracies that no centrality is going to fully comprehend or effectively provide for praxiologically. An excellent math teacher...even if they were fluent in French, would likely make an awful French teacher were they not trained how to teach in a second-language acquisition context, and I would argue that a "one-size-fits-all" class would not do that.
4. This actually makes sense to me!
5. It would appear that I’m fine…my group seems at least open to the idea of multimodal, and we can likely find enough in common to come upon a topic. Others, on the other hand, are being flat-out rejected. I didn’t want to end up in that situation…it would have made this course miserable...
OK…maybe the “you get to choose your research partners” is over-reaching…but you get to choose your research focus…I’m not going to ever be compelled to study the intersections of CALL and Engineering., even if I might in five years get roped into research with some moon-bat I’m not thrilled with because the research takes a wicked curve into psycholinguistics…or…heaven forbid…Ed. Psych. ;-)

NMAP:

This is AWESOME (snippet below) and I would love to have a whole class on the nature of academia and why things are structured as they are. How did we create these "realities" about what academic departments are and how they are organized and what is "real" about a discipline? These decisions are made not because there is a "truth" about the existence of a field, but because we CREATE it. Excellent, excellent example that maybe I'll use in class. (It's fine by me if you want to blog this stuff.)
(And I've seen lots of excellent language teachers who never had classes in pedagogy or SLA. Also seen lots of awful ones who have..go figure. IT's the class "is teaching an art or a science? argument. )
I realize that you are coming at this from the instructional designer / subject matter expert POV, but I would argue that this is only working (and increasingly so) in the business world. You espouse a centralized view of instruction and pedagogy that is not only diametrically opposed to my point of view, but to the overwhelming view of higher education. Pedagogical and research environments in most institutions of higher education are decentralized to some degree, with greater decentralization in large research universities. Larger institutions with a significant research mission (such as ours) tend to emphasize disciplinary academic efforts in both instruction and research and place a great deal of authority at the department level. If we extend your argument, then we should have a universal methods course to teach pedagogy as a monolith, and cast off entire subdisciplines that have been devoted to the idiosyncracies of teaching and researching certain subjects. While I believe that there is room for interdisciplinarity to some degree (you have programs like film studies or Latin American studies, etc. that administratively codify this idea), even your own college is structured to reflect the reality that there are content areas, and that content areas have their own discourses and vocabularies and idiosyncracies that no centrality is going to fully comprehend or effectively provide for praxiologically. An excellent math teacher...even if they were fluent in French, would likely make an awful French teacher were they not trained how to teach in a second-language acquisition context, and I would argue that a "one-size-fits-all" class would not do that.

Concerned Student:

And I've always been of the opinion that methods courses largely give you the vocabulary you need to articulate what you do in praxis. I taught for a while before I hit a methods course. It simply gave me the "jargon" to explain in a "meta" way what I was already doing.

Still, I think I would be a terrible math teacher....

And I agree that we have created the reality in which we live. You just strike me as the Don Quixote here...tilting at windmills....

[etc. etc. etc.]

RTB pleure

2009-08-27T15:11:00.004-04:00

"I free myself for today and forever from human immobility"

RTB Wants You to Show & Tell Your DA/CA Tools!

2009-08-25T10:51:00.004-04:00

I'm looking forward to going hunting for good discourse analysis tools during the semester. I have a list of things to start looking at, and I'd like to hear what experiences any of you have had with these or other tools I fail to mention:

CLAN (supports Jeffersonian notation)...the most general tool available for transcription, coding, and analysis.

Phon ...phonological and phonetic data analysis ...transcribed in CHAT. Fully compatible and interoperable with CLAN.

ELAN ...analysis of gesture (from video) and conversational overlap. Complete interoperability between ELAN and CLAN.

EXMARaLDA ... "Extensible Markup Language for Discourse Annotation"....XML for DA? Think of this linked up with A/V. Very powerful concept...but how's the praxis?

TalkBank and the SIDGRid Project seem like good places to learn how to do/approach all of this.

Also looking at retail options as well...any advice / personal experiences welcome:

RTB Likes Validity — Hates the Hegemony of Print Culture

2009-08-21T13:48:00.024-04:00

I finally have some time to respond to the second issue that in my mind arose from Week 1, the idea of multi-modal data and its "published" representation.

To understand my position(s), it might be helpful to look at a post I made last year about an article by Marc Prensky concerning a shift in media culture and the rise of a new concept of literacy. Just as the affordances of an emerging print culture (permitting people to generate, store and retrieve ideas as needed across time efficiently and accurately, affording the development of complex ideas) displaced the dominant oral culture of the ancients (Remember, Socrates was a vehement opponent of the emerging print culture, calling it "inhuman"), so new media, with their ability to fuse orality, performance and text to convey meaning in ways a print culture simply cannot, are poised to supplant that print culture, naysayers notwithstanding. Which brings me to two thoughts:

Given where we stand, it puzzles me that discourse analysis (at least what we've seen and discussed so far) concentrates on such a small sliver of the meaning we convey as to render it hollow. Communication ("speech" or "illocutionary" acts in the broadest sense), has always been multi-modal, as communication is not exclusively linguistic...in fact, go out and find an article that discusses the various components of communication, and most will spring from or reflect Mehrabian's (1971) "7%-38%-55% Rule"...only 7% of the meaning we convey is linguistic...38% comes from paralanguage, and 55% comes from non-verbal communication. Yet, DA/CA privileges linguistic speech acts as data, with some token aspects of paralanguage. Does it occur to anyone that this might cause one to unwittingly produce an analysis akin to Horace Miner's Nacirema? My mind goes back to one of the earliest cases of "deconstruction experts" in the courtroom (of course, I can't remember the name of the case now, does it ring a bell to anyone?). Someone was accused of an intentional criminal act, and the prosecution hung their case on the dialog transcript from a video, and had the defense let that go, it likely would have been an open-and-shut case. The defense, however, hung their case on a frame-by-frame deconstruction of the paralanguage and non-verbal communication, which was in their representation diametrically opposed to the sense the prosecution was trying to establish via the dialogue. The defendant was acquitted. I can think of a million "faux pas" that could occur in intercultural analyses if non-verbal communication was not taken into account. I don't know whether to blame the hubris of a logocentric Western society, the slow-grinding wheels of "les vieux dinosaurs" of academia, or my own impatience for not letting Trena "get to that" later on in the semester. I guess I'll know before long, won't I?

But (perhaps) more to the point: for a discipline that places high value on the analysis of 'naturally occurring' language use, you would think that there would be an equally high value placed on conveying that information in a 'natural' or 'contextualized' way, especially given the affordances of new media. That having been said...have you looked at the Jeffersonian notation system? Could anything be more de-contextualized than rendering the intricacies of speech acts via text and an arbitrary set of signifiers for which one must acquire a taste? Now, in her defense, if I were operating in an academy that was the paragon of print culture, and the technologies of another/emergent literacy were not available to me, I would have done the same thing...what else could I do? I cannot blame Gail Jefferson. But we know better. We have known for some time that this kind of reduction strips communication of the system of references and repetitions between the three modes, as well as intermodal discourse indicators that we rely on when "reading" a conversation. We have the means to fix it...we can display video, play audio, and mount text simultaneously, with any one of the modes serving as gloss for the other (although it makes the most sense for the marginalia to be textual). We have infinite storage and a society (and, mirabile dictu, administrators) willing to embrace a switch to digital scholarship. We as scholars are the ones standing in our own way, and I find that lamentable.

Mehrabian, A. (1971). Silent messages. Wadsworth, Belmont, California.

RTB Likes Transparency

2009-08-20T18:42:00.013-04:00

Ah, the joy of the blog! If some ridiculous idea gets floated out in class and you don't really have the opportunity to refute it, you can tell Blogger all about it...Blogger will kindly inform those who care (and a few who don't if you're beaming to FB) that their stances are informed (or should I say misinformed) by conventionalized Procrustean research and scholarship paradigms that center on such outmoded dissemination notions such as the sufficinecy of print culture, the essentiality of intellectual property and single authorship, and the primacy of the signifier. (Man, those Foucault Flakes are really making mileage this year!)

If you haven't figured it out yet, writing for me is a process of irritation: I usually have to be provoked to write, and I like to write to provoke. Call it catharsis, call it "paying it forward"...whatever.

In my mind, there were two issues that arose out of the digital scholarship (DS) provocation: one was the idea of the motives behind the dissemination of DS, the other was the promise/fear of multimodality in DS. This entry deals with the former...the latter will come...don't you worry.

I think the arguments that I was trying to make in class in the way of dissemination of scholarship largely parallel those in Sally Magnan's (2007) commentaries on digital scholarship, among those being: electronic access facilitates the discovery of previous studies, and the archiving function of databases provides durability for published research.

This is needed to avoid what Nina Garrett (2008) calls "the unwitting reinvention of...research that is carried out in ignorance of earlier studies"(p. 386). We should not be doing the same research / testing the same pedagogies over and over on new media and technologies...we should actually be REFLEXIVE and TRANSPARENT about our pedagogical frameworks and research tools, seeing them as culturally-charged, and modifying them to reflect changes in the affordances of the new tools and media.

I think that my point may have been poorly communicated, because what the NMAP had to say in response seemed in my mind to be entirely disconnected from the narrative I was following:

"What I have a problem with when people start to want to videotape is because what they're really saying is 'I'm afraid I'm going to miss something, and I need to videotape everything, because I need to accurately capture exactly what happened', when you're never going to be able to do that. And the researcher is always making these decisions as to what's important and what's not."

I agree. The researcher is always going to make decisions, have an organizing agenda...as a reader, I would like to see not only what choice was made, but what the choices were. I'm all for seeing things through another's lenses...I would like to then take them off and see them through my own, or another's and another's and another's. I don't see this as damaging to scholarship, but encouraging it...In fact, in some disciplines, a nascent form is already happening, both with audio and video. I envision lively discussions and debate and scholarship around available and multimodal phenomena, seeing them through various lenses, understanding that even that is not authentic, but it is a lot closer than a Jeffersonian transcript.

In an era of digital scholarship, using multi-modal data collection is not an issue of chasing the vain dream of having the perfect "thick description", it is a matter of academic transparency. To take something the NMAP said completely out of her contect and put it into mine: "Everything that everybody sees is there for researchers to analyze...and you can analyze it in a much more thorough way."

But this movement challenges elitist notions like single authorship, intellectual property, and the primacy of the print culture, so fear leads to skepticism. Academe looks upon digital scholarship like newspapers looked upon blogs back in the day.

Academe will soon find out what newspapers did:

Resistance is futile.

Garrett, N. (2008). "The Reinvention of Different Kinds of Wheels..." The CALICO Journal Vol.25, No.3, pp. 385-386.
Magnan, S. (2007). "Commentary: The Promise of Digital Scholarhip in SLA Research and Language Pedagogy." Language Learning & Technology Vol.11, No.3, pp. 152-155.

RTB is Eating his Words

2009-08-18T09:30:00.024-04:00

Wiggins, S., J. Potter, et al. (2001). "Eating your words: Discursive psychology and the reconstruction of eating practices." Journal of health psychology 6(1): 5.

I'm guessing that the newly-minted associate professor (heretofore referred to as the NMAP) had us read this article for practical purposes: two doctoral students carrying out research write a paper with their discourse analysis professor...we'll likely discuss quality and clarity of flow, choice of transcription scheme (I hope to high heaven that the NMAP or her minion** have some alternate schemes to show us, because I'm not enamored with the one here), etc. I'm certain we'll talk about how a discourse analysis was able to enearth some complex dynamics about speech acts and food acts that a quantitative study could never discover on the best of days. I'm sure that the NMAP had her reasons for picking this article over others, and it is a very interesting concept indeed.

Perhaps a little too interesting.

The whole juxtaposition of speech acts and eating sent me back almost 15 years (has it really been that long?) to a course on Psychoanalysis in Literature that I took with Esther Rashkin. Hands down one of the most fascinating courses I have ever taken...Dr. Rashkin is hardcore, which makes for an excellent professor. Heavens, I could go on for pages about the discussions had about TNG episodes, Poe, etc., but you can get a small taste of the experience by simply reading her two books:

Rashkin, E. (1992). Family secrets and the psychoanalysis of narrative, Princeton University Press.

Rashkin, E. (2008). Unspeakable secrets and the psychoanalysis of culture, State University of New York Press.

We waded through Freud, Lacan, Ferenczi and a host of others, but I most remember Dr. Rashkin's discussions of Abraham and Torok's L'écorce et le noyau (that's The shell and the kernel: renewals of psychoanalysis for those of you who have not yet acquired the celestial language) and specifically the chapter entitled "Mourning or melancholia: Introjection versus incorporation." Don't worry, I wouldn't dare attempt to resume any of this for you...go read it yourself if you want. But from these readings we were invited to read and watch Babette's Feast and write a psychoanalytical paper drawing from the text and/or film. That exercise was exciting on the front end, and almost laughable in retrospect. But the analysis she shared with us after our feeble attempts was truly amazing, and actually make up Chapter 1 of her 2008 book, which you can read in its nascent form here in Style. The Wiggins article made me flashback to a conversation that reads something like this point in Rashkin's Babette article:

"Abraham and Torok's idea that the literal ingestion of food can function as a figure of the introjective process specific to nonpathological mourning also seems highly pertinent since the transformation of loss into speech in Dinesen's story occurs following the consumption of a feast."

The point of all of this beyond subjecting you to my stream of consciousness? Well, if anyone pursues any of this in their COPIOUS amounts of free time, they'll be intructed and delighted. As for the reflexive moment here...well, I doubt I am voiding myself of potential unintended analytical "lenses", but at least I'm making myself aware of the ones I have, right?

Anyway, once I left the trip down memory lane, I came across a couple of things that might interest / made me stop. I was looking up some of the articles that Wiggins et. al. cite to debunk traditional, quantitative methodology in regards to eating practices/attitudes, and I had to giggle a bit, because at least one of the articles has a Technorati-esque "citation-roll" that proudly displays that it is cited by the Wiggins article! I guess any kind of publicity really is good publicity....

Oh, and I found this on Skribd (It's Sage...it must be good...but I suspect it won't be there long...because this strikes me as being a tad bit on the shady side of shady):

Conversation Analysis & Discourse Analysis

**The minion should know by know that I respect her (and the NMAP) too much to call her "the assistant", and I can't very well call her by her first name (don't want RTS and FB folk confusing her for my bien aimée, and she may not wish to have ID traces here, frankly). I've never understood why minion is taken so pejoratively...it originated as a term for protégés, especially those of a monarch. "Henchman" or "lackey" really aren't synonyms (although you'll find dictionaries that claim they are), because even if minions are of subordinate rank to their patrons they are likely to be of noble birth or to be raised to the nobility, and are more companions and confidants to monarchs than servants or bodyguards. So "minion" she is...

RTB gets reflexive!

2009-08-17T13:09:00.008-04:00

As you may or may not know, I have blog entries from the Rocky Top Bear Show (don't ask) beamed over to FB, because I have some friends that asked me to. They may soon regret having asked, but I hope not!

I've been looking over syllabi for my courses this semester, and noticed the following assignment for my discourse analysis class:

"As outlined by Watt (2007), engaging in regular reflection on the research process and on your growth as a researcher is an integral part of all qualitative, interpretive research. This is particularly true of discourse analysis from a discursive perspective. This assignment asks you to begin a reflexivity journal this semester and to make regular entries throughout the semester. I suggest that you use a blog for this purpose and post the link in the discussion board. If you would rather keep your journal private, you can send the link only to me. Alternatively, you may keep your journal in a Word document or some other electronic means that can be shared with me on a regular basis. At the end of the semester please write a synthesis of your journal entries/experience in the class, particularly how you have developed as a researcher and your understanding of the theory and practice of discourse analysis, discursive psychology and its applications to your own research agenda."

I gave some thought to how I wanted to keep this reflexivity journal and what would be most meaningful to me. My mind went back to a powerful article by Rupert Wegerif (2006) that I had occasion to read in a recent CMC/CSCL course, where he at one point channels Merlau-Ponty channeling Heidegger:

"...[T]he source of meaning is to be found not in the figures or in their backgrounds but in the difference between the two because it is the boundary around a figure that makes it exist as a thinkable thing." (p. 145)

This resonated strongly with a previous allusion to Bakhtin in the same article:

"the meaning of an utterance is not reducible to the intentions of the speaker or to the response of the addressee but emerges between these two". (p. 144)

I could very well keep this a private affair between teacher and student, or perhaps even open it up to classmates, but I'm certain that the entries would not _mean_ as much to me, because if I buy into this idea that meaning emerges in the boundary between "figure" and "background" or "speaker" and "addressee", why would I not want that boundary to be a granular as I could get it? Besides, a lot of my FB friends either are profound colleagues whose opinions I respect immensely and who "get" what I'm doing or are good friends who have my implicit trust and who often "don't get" what I'm doing, and the reactions on both ends of the spectrum are very helpful in reformulating my thinking.

So I'm using the Rocky Top Bear Show (well, a part of it) to house my reflexivity journal, which means that entries will also pop up in FB. Please feel free to react / discuss / whatever, either on the blog or on FB. Tag = epc531. If you're not inclined to play the part of "background" or "addressee", please ignore the posts. I just wanted you to know that no, I haven't become completely unhinged, I'm being "encouraged" (with a 30-percent-of-your-grade gun to my head) to essentially "think out loud". So you have my sincere thanks or most abject apologies, whichever is most befitting.

Watt, D. (2007). On becoming a qualitative researcher: The value of reflexivity. The Qualitative Report 12 (1), 82-101.

Wegerif, R. (2006). A dialogic understanding of the relationship between CSCL and teaching thinking skills. Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning 1 (1), 143-157.

Need Another Reason to be a Gator Hater?

2009-08-12T12:33:00.002-04:00

As if a Vol really needed any more reasons to hate the State of Florida, stupidity has won out yet again in the Sunshine State.

Apparently, the terms "upgrade" and "virtual machine" aren't taught down there.

I can think of some GTAs that would grovel mightily for the iBooks...

I want my cyborg life

2009-07-17T11:41:00.001-04:00

I want my cyborg life is yet another reason to love danah boyd. I love her articles...How could I not have known she had a blog? I'm dense on occasion. But this is exactly the kind of sentiment I was feeling when I blogged about this over at Language Lab Unleashed.

Now I'm off to add danah to the blogroll.....

Photoface

2009-06-23T13:35:00.002-04:00

Tried using the mic. Looks like it gives you more recording time than others! Need to find a different photo, though...didn't work out so well....

Spud Yourself!

2009-06-23T13:07:00.000-04:00

Mac/PC Smackdown!

2009-06-08T09:28:00.002-04:00

Mac wins by K.O. 20 seconds into Round 1. PPV fans VERY upset.

Led Zeppelin in 100 years?

2009-06-05T08:26:00.002-04:00

When our music is relegated to symphony halls in a century, is this what will be left of Led Zeppelin?

History of the SL term "rez/derez"

2009-06-02T10:51:00.003-04:00

Torley can explain better than I can what rez means in SL. I found this video that shows the word being first used in TRON. What a travel back in time!

IALLT09 - Where do I start?

2009-06-02T08:48:00.002-04:00

There are very few conferences from which I take away great ideas that will immediately impact what I do and how I teach, and none but one that rejuvenates the professional soul and really is a family reunion in my mind. IALLT (The International Association for Language Learning Technology) is that conference. I've spent so much time getting ready for IALLT09 in Atlanta that it has been a month since I've cared to blog! Well, that and it is not in my nature...I have to work at it. Anyway, I'm sure the next few days will be peppered with random memory shots from IALLT09 that I find interesting.

Stay tuned!

2009-05-15T00:00:00.001-04:00

Second Life statsgreat free widgetsWidgetbox

I've officially become “app-noxious.”

2009-05-13T09:47:00.001-04:00

I had to laugh at this article...Instructional technology students, in my experience, fit this to a "T". Although I have to admit that some are bigger "app-holes" than others....

Even CR agrees!

2009-05-08T08:26:00.002-04:00

Wow...amazing how homework gets in the way of blogging!

Anyway, I was elated (not surprised), when CR showed how Macbooks swept their reviews of laptops!

What "Laptop Hunter" doesn't want you to know.

2009-04-20T09:42:00.001-04:00

Forget about Mac users being cooler...how about just being smarter?

Another Great PANDORA station

2009-04-17T10:00:00.002-04:00

I rarely need to "thumbs down" a song on this PANDORA channel.

Judge Harry Stone would be proud.

AT&T Feeling Threatened by Skype?

2009-04-06T11:09:00.002-04:00

I really need to start blogging my "predictions" or "premonitions" when I get them, so it doesn't look like I'm simply bandwagoning when I have known this all along!

I have thought for the longest time that mobile VoIP was going to be the death-knell of the cell phone industry, much like blogs have been to the newspaper industry as we know it. All it takes is one company to offer iPhone-esque hardware, and charge simply for unlimited wireless access. No minutes...no need. You have Skype or something else to allow you to talk globally for free.

Well, this of course won't sit well with those currently in the driver's seat of the industry, just as journalists first scoffed at blogs...before they got really nasty. VoIP wasn't really on the radar of the cell industry...until Skype got an iPhone app. Now, they're getting nasty.

I'm secretly hoping that US Cellular will make the jump to a new business model (and to iPhones), because I am ready to ditch AT&T!!!

Twitter stirs lazy journalism

2009-03-31T13:27:00.002-04:00

I understand newspapers and their desire to vilify the disruptive technologies that will one day lead to their demise or render them irrelevant. This is what people who aspire to jobs that may no longer exist when they graduate think of new media. Let's reduce it for you:

Talking ain't what it used to be.
Telephones are cool, even though it ain't face-to-face.
IMs are cool, even though there's no voice.
But SMS (oh, my!) is the bane of our existence and the demise of Westen Civ.!
And Twitter! Don't get me started! I don't get it, but don't get me started!
If we had a Twitter account, we would wear our Luddite tendencies on our sleeves!

Let me help you out on the Twitter part. Dr. Donna Murphy of the Edinboro University of PA had a very interesting take on this struggle in education and conferences recently in the SLED discussion list:

"There's some misunderstanding here...twitter, backchannel, etc. isn't necessarily multi-tasking. When you're focused on the topic that you're hearing about, and thinking/responding to it through various media, it's the same task for you. It's just a different way to take notes. I find it interesting that people rarely see taking notes in a lecture as multi-tasking, but twitter is. For some of us, our brains don't stop asking questions during a lecture. These other media allow us to ask those questions, and in some ways declutter our brains and capture our reactions. As a bonus, I can also get some response to that process (say, another expert telling me that the information I'm listening to has been debunked already) with the same ease as glancing at the clock in the room."

Interactive note-taking. Funny that journalism students (or their advisors) wouldn't think of that.

Of course, that may be why newspapers are failing.....

SL in Education on CNN (Again)

2009-03-31T09:11:00.003-04:00

Caught this video while working out @ the RUSH this weekend:

Some good examples educational tools that can be deployed, some universally.

Simon the STUD!

2009-03-31T08:40:00.003-04:00

My youngest has the intestinal fortitude of my wife!

Did the ran-too-fast-fell-flat-on-my-face-and-bit-a-hole-in-my-lip thing @ the gym play area while my wife was working out...not a peep, apparently! How did the gym employees find out? They noticed a big splotch of blood, and followed the red trail until they found him...playing as though nothing had happened!

Took him to East Tennessee Children's Hospital, and he had to get 3 stitches deep into his mouth. Oh, he cried, but not because it hurt...he was mad that 5 people held him perfectly still and immobile for about 5 minutes while the sewing took place!

Levi, the yin to Simon's yang, is more my temperament. Had the same thing happened to him, all of Knox County would have known about it!

Simon rocks!!!

Lulu's (kinda) back in town...with Mel and on Sesame Street?

2009-03-27T14:08:00.003-04:00

There is a great version of this song that Mel Tormé sings with the Marty Paich Dek-tette that I CAN'T FIND ANYWHERE ONLINE! (Not on Blip, not on Pandora that I can tell).

I managed to find a live version that isn't bad, a scat duo of the song with his son:

And, if you can believe it, I found a version on SESAME STREET, of all places...a bit bowdlerized, although it's not clear to me how "pretty coquettes" differs from "blondes and brunettes" except that the former may be more inclusively sexist. "Lulu" has the physique of Sam the Eagle, the fur of a darkish Harry, and the voice of Cookie Monster:

Pepsi is IT!!

2009-03-27T13:58:00.001-04:00

I always knew I was cool....

Lithium

2009-03-23T09:28:00.008-04:00

Isn't this a lovely way to start a Monday? I really like this song because I think I "get it" a little better than others, not as good as some...

In a not-so-distant former life, I got a front-row seat to a wide spectrum of mental illnesses, from organic confusions to BPD. The easiest class I took as an undergrad was abnormal psychology...I slept through the chapter on medications and still aced the test,with high mention for the essay on tricyclics, because I was a daily (and occasional nightly) witness to it. From an outsider's perspective, I couldn't at the time imagine ever wanting to live that roller-coaster life first-hand (it was nauseating enough living it second-hand). To the point: my companion at the time was convinced I had BPD (Actually, it was ADD, thankyouverymuch), so much so that I soon found myself at the doctor's office, getting a prescription for lithium. At the time, I didn't want the ensuing conflict of telling my companion "no", I did have a problem (just not BPD), and I was not averse to better living through prescribed pharmaceuticals.

I took them for 1 week, and that's it. I can't truly describe the feeling to you, it was like being tightly wrapped up, inside and out, with a metaphorical version of bubble wrap. My passion is teaching (technology and French), and I couldn't get half the rush I usually got from teaching, and apparently neither could my class, as they finally broached the subject (intervention-style) mid-week to ask me if I was sick or dying or something. I've never really wanted to or think I could fathom being on that stuff long-term.

I would imagine that for some, it's a relief to not be on that emotional roller-coaster. For others, I suspect they prefer the disorder.

And for someone who has never taken it, Amy Lee seems to capture the desperation-turned-to-anger that having one's "will to fly" drowned in medication evokes in some. Some people are willing to undergo, and even thrive on, the ascent from the ashes to "l'azur", knowing full well that, like Icarus, they will find themselves in the ashes once again.

Oh, BTW...like the video, too.

W is WoW (and I'm not talking about guilds...)

2009-03-16T14:26:00.003-04:00

Hotwire really overdid them selves this time. I was looking to save some money @ SCOLT, and got a rate with Hotwire for a 4-star on the ATL Perimeter at half the price of the conference hotel. I was expecting a dump, even for a 4-star. I had never before heard of the W hotels, but I'm telling you now that I so lucked out!

When I first got there, I actually thought I was in the wrong place! It looked like a club/day spa! Nice fusion Asian restaurant to the left (complete with spinner on the nights I was there) and a lobby with several "living rooms" to the right:

The entire hotel was adorned with candles and the sweet smell of incense (every floor seemed to have a different scent piped into the halls...my floor smelled a lot like sandalwood). At night, the halls were awash in a soft blue light that was very relaxing.

I truly found sanctuary in my room... spacious balcony, rainforest shower and the legendary Bliss Sinkside Six. The lemon sage aromatherapy from that alone was worth Hotwire's price! And sweet dreams: 350 thread count linens (not up to home snuff, but not bad at all for a hotel), featherbed, goose down duvet. Surfing the Internet on acustom designed blonde wood oversized desk while watching a movie on the mammoth flatscreen with a DVD from the in-room library.

I also suggest the W Personalized Wake-up Service. A nice woman apologizes profusely for disturbing the no-doubt awesome dream you were having, and tells you that it is time to rise and shine, unless you want them to just call you back in 15 minutes? No, I need to go use sWeat, the posh gym facility in the hotel.

I was describing this place to some of my friends, who then called my account "so metro...". If you had any idea how "meat n' taters" I am, you'd understand how great this hotel is.

Enough free advertising. Just had to gush.

Marilou et Garou -Tu Es Comme Ça

2009-03-13T15:50:00.002-04:00

Waiting for some time to post some SCOLT stuff....been busy this week with class stuff.

If you like Garou, you might like this:

Web 2.0 ... The Machine is Killing Us...

2009-03-03T09:42:00.003-05:00

Here we go...

You had to know that this was going to be the next attack on progress. I intend to collect all of the articles of this vein I can find. If you find some you would like to share for this meme (each of which will find its own entry in this blog), by all means send them via comment, and you will be credited appropriately. I noticed this morning on FR3 that Le Figaro has an article on how Facebook is killing us...as soon as the web version catches up, I'll post that here as well.

This one in a nutshell:

"The constant need to publish new and exciting facts is putting stress on successful bloggers, and the recent deaths from heart attacks of three popular writers is causing something of a rethink in the industry."

Yes, and beat writers were SO healthy back in the heyday of the newspaper....

Yet Another Scientist Who Isn't Well-Read...

2009-02-24T23:27:00.002-05:00

Professor Susan Greenfield claims that Facebook is turning our kids' skulls into mush and making our kids egocentric (!) Nevermind their parents...

Obviously, she also has not read Everything Bad Is Good for You: How Today's Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter!

The Problem with Pointing out Problems About the Metaverse

2009-02-24T22:58:00.002-05:00

Yet another article pointing out how impractical it is to, say, order a pizza via Second Life. What makes it worse is that Skribe goes through a mini-history of pushing the tech. envelope for such mundane tasks...but not far enough to evoke how difficult doing this (now a routine thing) was when the Internet was in its nascent stage. The Metaverse will evolve, these complaints (which sound a lot like those of 20 years ago) will be addressed, and the Metaverse will emerge as the new Internet platform. I can't judge intent. If the intent was "wishlist/bug fix" in nature, then this is fine. But if, as I suspect, this is a whine that states the obvious, then I just lost 5 minutes I'll never get back... ;-)

Which conference session would you go to, and why?

2009-02-20T08:35:00.002-05:00

I was reading an article attempting to debunk common [mis]perceptions about study abroad, but I got sidetracked by the very first paragraph. It made me want to ask: which is more interesting, conference sessions that "orient participants into the accepted language and landscape of a shared profession" or that "thoroughly rip apart the rhetoric and deconstruct a field’s founding myth"? If you had to choose, which one would you attend, and why?

If you got this from Bb...

2009-02-10T23:59:00.003-05:00

This is what passes for hilarious when one is up until midnight finishing an interview protocol due in the morning and surfs YouTube looking for something hypnotic to numb the mind:

I'm either dating myself or I'm not well, and I don't care to know which. Very stream-of-consciousness...

I tried to express this to my CSE 560 class, but embeds are still verboten in there, and I for some reason could not get an a href tag to work. I put in the link....I'm curious to see who goes out to the link, and even more curious to see what reactions occur from those that venture to a site with no context beforehand... I think I'll reply to my thread with a link to this post just to see who has no life...

If you are in 560 and you are reading this, you officially have no life! Welcome to the club. Sign the "guestbook" by commenting on this post....

A First Post from the Grid

2009-02-10T13:06:00.003-05:00

Object-Name: Slurlblogger v0.4
Region: VolNation (291328, 289792)
Local-Position: (226, 187, 22)

VolNation - Testing SLurlBlogger on VolNation when I should be writing up an interview protocol or finishing Debby's codesheet!

Is THIS Mac Easy Enough For 'Ya? IS IT?

2009-02-10T10:49:00.004-05:00

Not for the weak of heart...it is, after all, the Onion. While I disagree with the Pro-PC rant, this would be the perfect Mac for everyone that thinks that Macs are SO haaarrrdd to get!

Caveat auditor:

Apple Introduces Revolutionary New Laptop With No Keyboard

Let me turn on my contact lenses...

2009-02-09T08:34:00.002-05:00

IMHO, the Telegraph article is fascinating not so much for the "TV in my eye" prediction as it is for the "empath tattoo", where a patch will cause us to feel the emotions of the characters on-screen.

Singularity, anyone?

Rockytop is "irresponsible"

2009-02-01T12:44:00.002-05:00

Apparently, I'm irresponsible because I've allowed my family to expand beyond sane limits, creating an unbearable burden on the environment.

Talk about the tail wagging the dog!

2009-02-01T12:36:00.002-05:00

Did Roman culture revolve around the Circus Maximus to this extent?

Even Rockytop never gets to this kind of lunacy, does it?

I [insert your web 2.0 tool here], therefore I am?

2009-01-31T08:30:00.002-05:00

This is the first time I've seen an entry like this, but I bet it is said often, and I bet the sentiment is stunningly pervasive, even if not expressed:

"no internet @ home since yesterday!How can I manage?I'm tired & concerned...so much to catch up with 2day.Feels like I didnt exist yesterday"

Don't know what to make of it, though. Is thinking out loud via social networking the new cogito? What does this mean for the future of epistemology?

10 Ways Twitter Will Change Blog Design in 2009

2009-01-28T15:22:00.001-05:00

How many of the ten things Rachel Cunliffe (mashable.com) points out do you already do?