palimpsest

new home

Palimpsest can now be found at www.palimpsest.info

instant messaging: the new office hours

I'd like to hear from others about their experience using instant messaging as a means of interacting with students (or with professors, if you are a student). I put my IM info on all my syllabi, and I tell my students that if they catch me logged in, they can ask me questions, discuss assignments, or just talk about whatever they like. I'm logged in pretty frequently, and I find that I interact with students much more in this way than during live, in-person office hours.

Now, when I was an undergrad myself, I never made use of professors' office hours: there just never seemed to be a good reason. It seems that I was not unusual given that my students now don't really drop by very often, either. So I'm wondering:

1. Do students make use of your in-person office hours?
2. What are the advantages and disadvantages of using IM in addition to traditional office hours?

rebooting palimpsest

While I wait for / work on the MovableType reinstallation, I'm test driving TypePad with a free trial.

Art of (Class) Participation

Every wonder what class participation has to do with sprezzatura? Sage advice, via Kari Kraus.

The Great Debate

Here's an interesting resource: The Great Debate & Beyond: The History of Presidential Debates and Beyond. The archive includes select video clips froms televised presidential debates since 1960. Coincidentally, I was talking to a colleague about wanting to see (or show my students) the "You're no JFK" moment from the Bentsen-Quayle VP debate during the 1988 election, so this kind of resource could be really helpful. Also several good clips from Reagan's debates ("Are you better off four years ago?"). Thanks to Blog for Democracy for the good find. Cross posted at my personal blog, the chutry experiment.

teaching with new tools

Via Liz Lawley, educause on educational social software:

The September/October issue of Educause Review is devoted to “New Tools for Back-to-School: Blogs, Swarms, Wikis, and Games.” The articles are well worth taking a look at.

group work

Here's something I often wrestle with: I'll break a class into smaller groups which have some task or tasks to perform. After a while we'll reconvene and I'll ask each group to report results back to the class at large. The problem is that at ths point one person in the group will have been pre-selected or will emerge as the spokesperson, and the rest of the group will sit there like bumps on a log. If I work at it, I can usually get a couple of more from the group to engage--but then the rest of the class sits there like bumps on a log, observers of the spectacle. How to share group work with a large class in a more participatory fashion?

evaluating student blogging

Those teachers who require their students to blog for class might take a look at Dennis Jerz's brief entry titled "Framework for a Weblog Portfolio." For the first time in a long time, I'm teaching a writing class, and this semester I'm experimenting with student blogs, inspired largely by Chuck, who continues the practice in his Fall 2004 course titled "Rhetoric & Democracy.

class meetings on secondary readings

Back in February, KF posted this question to Palimpest: "How do you get your students to engage actively with a small piece of a long text before they've read the whole thing?"

I have the opposite question, I suppose: When you've assigned 2 or 3 articles of secondary reading for one class meeting, how do you provoke, manage, promote, (what-have-you) class discussion?

In my course on "Histories of Writing, Reading, and Publishing," we're reading a good many secondary articles here at the beginning of the course (like Darnton and Feather). Discussion is going pretty well, but I feel like we're perhaps moving a bit too quickly through the material and that we might not be doing it justice.

One way I try to frame discussion is through some basic questions:

• What are the main points of this essay?
• What are its strengths and weaknesses?
• How does it differ from / disagree with other material we've read?
• How does it apply to the issues we are considering?

So what do you do?

[Cross-posted on my blog.]

Fall Courses

Blogs and syllabi for both of my fall courses at the University of Maryland are now available: Computer and Text and Postmodern Literature.

improve students' thinking about your subject matter

From an instant-message conversation with a colleague about this post: "10 Ways to Use Writing in Class to Improve Students' Thinking about Your Subject Matter."

Course syllabi

Here are my course syllabi for the fall term, all using Liz Lawley's courseware for Movable Type:

read || write || talk, weblog for English 1200: Introduction to Literature in English,
Conversations, weblog for English 3205: Prose Narrative Before 1800, and
Bending sideways, weblog for GEND 2001: Introduction to Gender Studies

It's my first time using this format and I'm looking forward to it. And to avoiding WebCT.
Comments and suggestions welcome.

Icebreakers?

Back to school tomorrow. Anyone want to share some first day icebreakers? Note: I have large classes this semester, ~35.

Democracy Matters

Like George, I'll be teaching an election theme in my freshman composition class. I'm planning to post my syllabus online at some point. For now, here's a link to my course weblog.

american dialogues: composition course

I have a working syllabus for my fall composition course, which is the second in our series of two courses here at UMKC.

Course Title: American Dialogues

• "Democracy begins in conversation." -philosopher John Dewey
• "Go f--- yourself." -Vice President Dick Cheney

Course Description

The theme of this course is "American Dialogues," and we will focus our attention on political discourse in the contemporary American public sphere. Some fear that American citizens are not well served by the prevailing political discourse, that it is more focused upon butting heads and scoring quick points with the media than it is with thoughtful consideration of the issues. We will use a variety of critical tools to consider the messages of political campaigns, the information published by news outlets, and the commentary provided by a wide range of individuals.

In this course, you will develop your skills as a careful, thoughtful, and effective reader and writer. You will become better at the kinds of reading and writing expected of you as a college student, in your professional career, and as an American citizen. You will learn what it means to identify or construct an issue to write about, to consider and reconsider that issue as you investigate it further, and to craft the best available means of support and expression given your audience and your purpose. You will learn a set of language- and logic-based concepts and a vocabulary of language analysis and rhetorical strategy. As you learn more about how language and persuasion work, and as you learn to recognize and use more features of style and argument, you have a greater range of choices to make in crafting your own writing.

Well, there will be more flesh to the class, but that's basically the skeleton and the, er, muscle. I will assign current readings as news stories break and commentators commentate, but I also have some things in the pantry, ready to be stuck in the oven. How's that for mixing metaphors? Sweeney Todd, anyone?

For example, I think this comment thread at Critical Mass will prove useful. The whole "War Against Boys" issue should provide a good example of a topic upon which a great deal of rhetorical energy has been expended. O'Connor links to an interesting Salon article that lays out the issues and the players.

And just to be clear: the point of such reading material, for the class, is not that students need to come to terms with how boys and girls learn. Rather, students will observe and evaluate what rhetorical strategies different contenders use in such a public debate.

More details about this class and its critical framework will appear on my blog (and here on Palimpsest) as I continue to make public what English professors do (or at least this English professor).

Cross posted on my blog.

Syllabus design: Reading vs. Writing

What is more important in an upper-division (i.e., junior-level and above courses pitched primarily, though not exclusively, toward majors) course: reading or writing?

I freely confess that I am on the side of reading, especially primary texts. I love introducing new books or writers to students, or re-introducing them to writers they thought they hated. I also love the fact that I can point the students to texts that will orient them to an entire field of endeavor (for example, if you've read T. E. Hulme's "Romanticism and Classicism," you have a quick-and-dirty filter for interpreting an awful lot of modern British poetry). And since my students' prior experience with Victorian literature seems to diminish every semester, there's a lot to show them.

Writing is of course important, too, inasmuch as it allows us to assimilate what we've been reading. ("I don't know what I think about that . . . I haven't written on it yet.") I am a stickler about writing assignments, persnickety about grammar, logic, and the uses and abuses of evidence. But at the end of the day, I'd always rather make room for, say, Villette or whatever than inflict yet another paper. It's not like I assign no writing: A couple of medium-length papers, a handful of explication papers, and some dictionary exercises make up a typical semester's writing.

I wonder how other folks balance these competing demands, or if you've got a way to think about them such that they don't compete.

(Cross-posted from The Salt-Box. Aesthetics improved 8/16.)

Postmodern Lit

Just found out that one of the books I was planning to teach in my upper-level Postmodern Literature course this fall, Susan Daitch's The Colorist, is now out of print. That leaves me scrambling for a replacement. The course will have a sub-theme on urban space/aesthetics, including some attention to 9/11. Other authors include Delillo (Underworld and Cosmopolis both), Gibson's Pattern Recgonition, Alice Notley's Descent of Alette (poetry), an issue of Transmetropolitan (graphic novel) and other stuff that I'm forgetting. I'm looking for a contemporary novel that might fit here, and I'd like to have a female author to maintain gender balance. Kathy Acker's an obvious choice (Empire of the Senseless) but I'm not sure I have the nerve (or whatever it takes). A colleague's suggested Angela Carter. Thanks--

The Film Experience

Bedford-St. Martins has launched a website designed to complement Timothy Corrigan and Patricia White's The Film Experience: An Introduction. I haven't dug around too much, but the links section looks very useful and informative. If anyone is planning an introduction to film course, this might be a helpful resource.

Cross-posted at the chutry experiment.

19th-c news online

Via Slashdot:

mfh writes "The BBC is reporting that approximately a million news stories from the 19th century are going online. The project will cost roughly $3.6 mil USD (converted from UK pounds) and include 100 years of news and images from publications that are no longer copyright protected, and currently only available at the Newspaper Library in Colindale, North London. 52000 newspapers and magazines will be included and the project should take 18 months to complete."

Looking for Film Stills

I'm teaching cinematography through Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo this week (through Tuesday), and I've been trying to track down a few film stills to support some in-class activities. The main difficulty is actually finding stills that are in the proper aspect ratio. Most of the stills online appear to be publicity stills (not film stills) or cropped. So far, I've found this book review with a couple of good stills. Any suggestions (in the comments or by email) would be much appreciated. Update: Here are a few other Vertigo sites I found after my original post: A site called "Vertigo Described," which includes an extende essay on the film as well as a few film stills (too cluttered for my purpose), and a very interesting news article on a "Vertigo Tour of San Francisco" that directs tourists to all of the locations Hitch used in the film. Finally, a site called NorCal Movies, which is dedicated to documenting films made in Northern California (this site has plenty of great film stills, but having a better method for finding stills would probably be a good thing). Cross-posted at the chutry experiment.