Turns out USF has loads of wonderful opportunities for summer abroad programs: http://global.usf.edu/educationabroad/.  

Now that my kids off to college, I'm looking at study abroad opportunities.  

• One idea I have for a study abroad project is a graduate-level course on Scholarly Publishing, and I'm working on a course proposal for that here.  Wouldn't it be awesome to find faculty abroad who are passionate about ETDs (electronic theses and dissertations)–and eager to support graduate-level innovation?
• Another idea would be an undergraduate creative nonfiction course, and I'm working on a course proposal for that here.  I've found a program at the University of Limerick that looks like a good fit, and it would give me a chance to reflect on my roots as two of my grandparents are from the Limerick area…

Earlier, I made the argument the iPad isn't a writing tool, that it is primarily a reading tool, a delivery mechanism for the Internet.  From my perspective hanging on to the cliffs of Mt. Microsoft, using tools like SharePoint Designer, SharePoint, etc., this is all still true:  I can't edit some of my primary texts, particularly http://fyc.usf.edu, and this drives me nuts!  Unless I use the mobile view, in fact, I cant even view SharePoint 2010 sites! 

That said, it's an amazing delivery tool.  And, so long as you comfortable along the gentle shores of Apple, it's a writing tool, especially an email tool.  Throughout the last two weeks of Orientation for FYC, I was always connected to work–enabling me to stay on top of the 80+ emails I get every day.  While presenters made their spiels, I could take detailed notes.  I'm more comfortable during meetings as well, as I can take notes and know I'll have them later on.

But jeez, this means I'm always working.  I've even taking to writing notes in difficult traffic.  Work, work, work, I'm always working cuz of this amazing tool.

Now I'm heading off to see Craig to college, and I'm wondering if I can cut myself for a week, disable my email, go off the grid.  How successful do you think I'll be?

As Craig hits the road this a.m. for Project Waves and then Duke, I can't help but remember past first-day school pictures.  When I was younger, I'm glad I listened to those that said I wouldn't believe how quickly the time would go…..

Several months later……I called Verizon and loaded some software called "WPA" on my router.  Subsequenty, I must acknowledge my earlier misdiagnosis about my  iPad's  learning disorder. 

That said, I continue to feel the iPad is primarily a reading delivery device, an injection device, for those of us who prefer reading stuff digitally.  The tool has significantly enhanced my web reading experience of ejournals and newspapers.  But for me, perched on Mountain Microsoft, I find it's not an effective writing tool.  But let me contextualize this: I'm primarily working on http://fyc.usf.edu these days, a SharePoint 2010 site.  My Safari browser crashes when I try to write there.  Worse, the pages on the site don't scroll.  Now I can get at them at  http://fyc.usf.edu/m but using the moble reader isn't aesthetically pleasing.

Process wise, not much going on other than getting Project Writing Program off the ground!  After these two weeks of Orientation, I hope to get back to moving http://collegewriting.org into ePub format…I suspect that in itself is more than enough for me to hold my iPad above my shoulders and rejoice, K'Naan style..

Thankfully, I forget each year how much work it takes to get USF's First-Year Composition Program off the ground.  Each summer, we have this inspiring if daunting push to revise our curriculum, to reflect on the feedback we receive from our students, teachers, and assessment process.  (Plus, as a creative community, we hope to develop new projects, activities.  Bottom line, it's enough for me to get up at 4:00 a.m. with stuff to do–what every academic needs, eh?)

This summer we had–as usual–stunning contributions from our graduate students: Jessica McKee, Kyle Stedman, Dan Richards, Megan McIntyre, Curtis LeVan, and Kendra Lee.  Again, Kate Pantelides volunteered her time to attend the summer brainstorms related to our curriculum innovation.  And I can't forget Drew Smith who gave us invaluable feedback about the need to improve our approach to integrating This team worked very hard–and very independently.

One of the things I've come to learn that I love about being a WPA is the opportunity to work with these talented young scholars.  They bring a level of comittment and energy that us old turks have lost.  I can't praise this summer's group enough.  

• Jessica McKee leads by example, energy, echoing Taylor's focus on the outcomes….
• Dan and Kendra have totally revised the reader for 1101, creating an 800+ page book that rivals the work of any textbook out there.  Ok, it's not free–and the hysteria around free textbooks is rising to a crescendo–because even the permissions budget for the readings is $30,000.  Yet how can we measure a textbook's quality?  To me, it's the level of its usage.  Given that we've designed the textbook around our curriculum, I expect unprecedented usage.  Plus, we're piloting tear-outs.
• Kyle has played a masterful role helping us make the move from our old website, http://collegewriting.us, to our new digs: http://fyc.usf.edu  This may sound simple but it's like moving the water out of one swimming pool into another, using a teaspoon.  Patience, attention to detail, a flair for design–?
• Meanwhile, Megan and Curtis work with great independence yet with an ear to past feedback on their efforts to develop the ENC 1102 reader, which will be available by the spring semester

Ok, so in an earlier post, I blasted my new iPad for having a learning disorder. Frustrated, I was complaining about how I kept needing to log on to the device and retype the router password.

Turns out, the problem wasn't with the iPad.  It's the router I use from Verzion.  Now I've talked with Apple and they told me I needed to get WPA enabled for my router.  I need to call Verizon and ask for technical help.  That's good news.

Speaking of my iPad, I've got to report I loved having the 3G at the recent Writing Program Administrator conference.  It's a treat to be away a conference or travel and still be able to keep on writing.  I've praised the benefits of daily writing much of my career as a writer. Now I have a handy writing tool that enables me to stay in contact with my documents that reside in the clouds.  Ok, so maybe I need to rethink that it's just a reading tool.

Maybe I was way too hard on arguing the Ipad was just a reading tool, that it wasn't a valid writing device. I still think the iPad is primarily a reading device.  I know it's increased my reading of the nation's newspapers and sites like Huffington. 

But I'm also coming to understand how the iPad is a writing experience.  I've become very excited about the iBook movement. My first step into this genre has been to plant a flag for http://collegewriting.org.  Neil Gomes and Allyn C. DiVito have helped me set up a sample of the first chapter of the Vision section from my online book, CollegeWriting.Org.  Allyn C. DiVito from USF's CTE21 did a wonderful job quickly generating a sample template for the Vision section of http://collegewriting.org.  Apparently, it's not terribly difficult to use Adobe inDesign5 to prepare a text to be publishable in the format that IBook accepts: ePubFrormat.

Seeing the possibilities of ebooks is really inspiring to someone like me.  As a writer, I see that ebooks offer an exciting new genre, new ways to reach readers.  You can go from idea to print very quickly.  This is clearly going to be a game changer when it comes to how people define books or how they read books.

I think I'm going to have fun seeing http://collegewriting.us evolve as an ebook.

So now it's time to learn InDesignCS5…

I'm typically not very political.

Yeah, I know, "Whose fault is that?"   But after a brief opportunity to bowl with the remarkable folks at Rock the Vote at the Truman Bowling Alley in the White House, I'm feeling very patriotic and more jazzed about activism–more inspired by the young… 

I recognize there are some folks who are down on President Obama–and the possibility of leadership from anyone in Washington .  Clearly, Obama has an impossible job.  He's inherited a massive economic slowdown.  Europe….the world economy…..The best thing for us all now is to play the believing game, to remember that our country has faced massive challenges in the past, challenges that were overcome with our pioneering/entrepreneurial spirit.  Still,  I must admit the daily spin shows a dysfunctional Congress–folks refusing to seek the commonspace.

But Washington has more than politics.  The crowd in the picture below is waiting to buy cupcakes!.  The cupcakes are so good you need police to hold the crowd back.   Of course they are doing a reality show on the event.  Now if this were about coffee, I'd just have to move to Washington. But as is, I'm keeping my distance for the sweets (I hope.) 

Media Research

In this video, Lisa is employed by Verizon to meet her MySpace or Facebook friends.  She's researching whether her social media friends could be real friends.  Viewed critically, this could be seen as a crass move on the part of a company to pump its product:, a phone/pda/videocamera.  But what if Verizon really did this–sponsored independent research, and Lisa was free to reflect on everything?

Then you'd have academic or qualitative research. Who wouldn't want to follow in the steps of Eric Raymond or Dana Boyd?

Ethnographies can be stories about people living in one of the more interesting transitions in literacy.

Or maybe it would be fun to just go and meet those who share your name.  At FP today, I see there are 6 joemoxleys: http://www.beta.facebook.com/directory/people/M14228005-14229582  Imagine if your name were Mr. Smith…

I'm part of a faculty group reflection on ways the iPad is going to change teaching, learning, and knowledge.This is my first post on my reflections for how the iPad can be used in higher education contexts.

Okay, so I've got an iPad: 64 Gig 3G.  Price with warranty and a few apps: $1200–the price of a pretty good laptop…

Reading will Never be the Same

After a few days, I see this as a wonderful reading device; it enables me to use my fingers rather than a keyboard to write; that's wonderful, given my carpal-tunnel problems.  I can flip through webpages, scholarly journals, and magazines.  Cool.   The free Dragon app works better than the PC version, for which I paid around $179. Very cool.  But unlike my Dragon on my PC, I can't talk for my emails.  Oh no.

The iBook software Apple has created (and the various $.99 to 9.99 alternatives) is quite good.  I'm very excited to learn more about eML, ebook markup, because I'm thinking I must get moving on translating http://collegewriting.org into eML.  Too bad I didn't get the book up earlier..I'm sure iPad and Kno (see below), etc are  the future of textbooks…

But I digress.  To get back to my iPad experience, I'm sad  to report reading online websites, including newsmagazines, is less appealing.  This, clearly, is a transitional problem.  If you make the font large enough (that's right, I'm old and nearly blind), you have to use the scroll bar.   Even new magazines, like Educause are hard to read.  Judgment: over hyped.  Unless they improve the interface of standard webpages.  I guess that in the future websites will have an eML version.

And I don't know if I should disclose that my iPad has a learning disorder: for first few days it forgot the network key on the Verizon box at home.  At the university, it's fine but here it loses the network.  Then, when you type in the key, it regains network for 10 minutes or so–sometimes.  Annoying.

Apple Embraces Command and Control: WooHoo, Apple Makes the Internet Disappear

I also purchase the VGA connector so I could hook the iPad into a classroom projector. Imagine my surprise, then, to find I could only project from Keynote, Apple's app for presentations.  Apparently it's also a filter, a way of erasing the Internet in terms of visibility and empowering Keynote.  Ugh.  And folks say Microsoft is evil?  This is amazing and disappointing to me as an educator–playing power politics rather than embracing the values of the community of learning.  Ok, so the stock is up, what 500%, and the greed is still growing strong. 

Early Adopter Blues

Well, being 2,000,0001 isn't exactly beging an early adopter, eh Dr. Rogers?  And though I got the wireless keyboard and can enter text–as I'm doing now–I also recognize this tool privileges reading, not writing.  Plus, I'm accustomed to using SharePoint libraries for handling my documents and w/o Word, well, I'm out of luck, so I'll need to use alternative writing tools, Google Docs.  Of course, as Dennis Baron has detailed, new tools require new behaviors and they are adopted when they make a process easier.  For sure, reading email on the iPad or texts via Apple's reader is easier.  For this reason alone, iPad rocks. Clearly, I have multiple identities. On a related note, check out this pic from an Apple Demo at USF:  What do you notice that looks strikingly familiar? 

The lecture model!  Isn't that amazing?  Now my point isn't to knock Apple here.  My point is that we teachers tend toward the lecture model.  And when technicians come to campus, or sales people, they do what they do.

Apple gets some of USF's best tech folks together and then tells them what they already know, what, as the speaker repeatedly mentioned, could be downloaded from the Internet!  Jeez, just pass out 20 iPads, break us into groups and have us brainstorm!  What can we learn from each other.  This is new stuff.  Where are we going, educationwise?

But to break away from the lecture mode, we need to be good at organizing groups.

So what does the bottom line?

 The iPad isn't a writing device, it's a reading tool, an injection system.  Right now I'm logged into a wiki page and visibility is murky: If you want to do some serious writing, get your laptop.

Wait, What did he say?
Oh, and what do I sense is the future?  Give me videos for every page.  Alphabetic text, move over. 

Hey, I'm gonna try this for.CollegeWriting.Org.  When?  Who knows?  I've been buried teaching Writing inthe Clouds and completing w/ my colleagues Agency in the Age of Peer Production, a research monograph.

Disclaimer!

Maybe you should dismiss the above as I'm writing now from my PC: the iPad's learning disorder has worsened; I can't get the Internet from home w/ my iPad!

How can't you be other than a Lessig fan  That said, besides sandwiching his earlier work in a new tension metaphor, not much new here…

It is truly amazing that BP failed to have an operational shut-off value, that additional deep-sea oil rigs have been approved since the catastrophe w/ environmental waivers, that BP hires workers for a few hours to be a symbolic background for Obama's visit.

I suppose it's not surprising that BP has repeatedly lied about the extent of the damage:

Equally surprising, perhaps, is the lack of Federal oversight.  Yet perhaps it all comes down to our guilt, our willingness to look away because we need to pump gas into our cars so we can drive hither and yon.

Perspectives vary on this of course.  While enviornmentalists can't breathe, stock traders see a good opportunity for day trading BP….

CNN has a good live video up if you want to see the ongoing environmental attack: Live Video

I love the choice of Wavin' Flag for the World Cup.  I love the different versions of Wavin Flag per country….This shows our humanity. . . .

What a welcome break from the haunting spoilage of BP in the gulf–and the amazing news that the Feds have approved many additional environmental waivers

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iC8V8S_REhk

 ……..

Joe Moxley, http://joemoxley.org

Professor of English
Director of Composition
Department of English, CPR 107
4202 East Fowler Avenue

USF

Tampa, FL  33620

Taking an Honest Look at Graduate Student Teaching

Response to Adams, Henry. "Academic Bait-and-Switch." Chronicle.com. 18 June 2009. 25 June 2009 <http://chronicle.com/jobs/news/2009/06/2009061801c.htm>.

In “Academic Bail-and-Switch” (Chronicle 6/18/09), Henry Adams reflects on his past doctoral work at “ENU (Elite National U)” to critique elite universities for use of graduate students to teach undergraduates. Given that I work at “BSU (Big State U),” which is light years away from ENU, perhaps I should not be so annoyed by “Henry Adams’” recent first-person essay. As a composition director at Big State U, I have other battles to fight, including retaining reasonable class sizes in the face of massive budget cuts. Plus, what with billions of dollars in endowments and $50,000+ tuition costs, the ENUs can clearly take care of themselves. 

In his brief diatribe, Adams critiques ENU for not preparing graduate students to teach first-year composition. Adams argues ENU did not really care about teaching writing: “Elite National U. did not want me to teach first-year students as much as sort them according to the abilities they brought with them to my classroom.”  Adams reports that back in “those days,” back in the distant past–perhaps 10, 20 or 30 years ago–when he was a doctoral student, that the professor in charge of training the doctoral students to teach composition believed “[i]ntellectual life in America collapsed when universities began granting graduate degrees in education. I’ll teach you content. Figure out pedagogy on your own.”

            In part I’m sympathetic to Adams’ fear that he was an academic fraud when he first taught composition: at one point or another we may all feel that we are frauds. This is so common it has a name: “The Imposter Phenomenon,” which was theorized by Pauline Rose Clance and Suzanne Imes back in 1978. Lawyers, doctors, judges, therapists—you name it—people across professions acknowledge feeling like imposters on occasion.  Past Chronicle reports have demonstrated that the Imposter Phenomenon is alive and well in academe.  Ultimately, I suspect most first-time teachers feel likes frauds.  In their first few years of professional work, it seems like to me that most people feel like frauds.

            Even so, I think Adams crosses the line with the subtitle to his article, which is boldfaced below the title: “Many a tenured professor today is guilty of fraud…”  With this movement to the present tense, which is repeated throughout the essay, Adams presents his memoir as a critique of higher education.  Sure, such critiques are warranted. To begin with, we need to assign a great deal more writing and challenge students to employ different media and genres. We all need to recognize that the problem with undergraduate student writing is not the English Department’s problem (it’s the University’s problem). We need to engage students and faculty in writing across the disciplines. And we all need to be honest about weaknesses with our curriculum: by and large we are not providing students with the literacy experiences they need—the ability to twitter, write cogent emails, produce podcasts and multimedia reports. At the doctoral level, graduate schools are more concerned with whether theses and dissertations follow formatting guidelines, whether the margins are at least an inch and a half, rather than helping students make the transition to 21^st Century scholarship and produce multimedia theses and dissertations based on sound academic research. Just as importantly, we need to stop the exploitation of graduate students. Rather than paying them pennies on the dollar for their labor, we need to acknowledge their credentials and training and pay accordingly.

While it may seem intuitively right to assume graduate students are less qualified than tenured faculty to teach first-year composition, my experience has been that many graduate students bring terrific energy and professionalism to the composition classroom and program. Typically younger and more energetic than tenured faculty, graduate students are more likely to be hanging out online, in Facebook, twitter, and email accounts, ready to answer students’ questions, night and day.  Having not taught the writing course more times than they care to remember, graduate students are likely to prepare interesting classroom activities and assignments.  Facing a ridiculously tough job market, graduate students are likely to be well grounded in pedagogical theories and research. In some cases, even first-time graduate students are better instructors than tenured faculty. 

I hesitate to characterize these graduate students’ dedication as “passionate, committed, and exemplary” fearing that I might sound like a clichéd commercial for inept American car manufacturers, so let me describe their workload. Teaching in our program requires responding three times each to three 1500 word essays, grading two in-class essays, reviewing three blog posts/week, and keeping up with various homework assignments (plagiarism quizzes, MLA quizzes, and so on). In addition our teachers meet at least two times on a one-on-one basis with each student.  All the while our graduate students, enrolled in at least nine credits of graduate work, are walking that fine line between student and teacher. 

My point here is not that teachers in our program work hard for very little money (about $3000 per course with 25 students per course); rather, my point is that they work hard with love. More often than not I tell them to give less time to their teaching, not to neglect their classes and scholarship. (How often does a Chair need to give this message to his or her faculty?) Yet, because they teach with love, more often than not, they put their studies aside with hopes of helping the struggling students. Having worked in the field for 29 plus years, I suspect this was equally true back in “those days” that Henry Adams critiques.

Of course, at Big State U we have TAs who struggle as Henry Adams struggled.  To meet their needs, we have a mentoring program, one which puts our best teachers with new teachers who are just getting acquainted with our writing program. Mentors and mentees along with writing program administrators observe one another teach, creating a supportive pedagogical community. In addition, like other doctoral universities, we have a rigorous training orientation before our graduate students and adjuncts are allowed to teach year. We have a semester-long practicum that all new graduate students are required to take, which walks them through the theories, pedagogies, and policies that shape our work. In addition, again like other research universities, we have advanced seminars in pedagogical theory. We also routinely survey undergraduates in our program throughout each semester, which alerts us to problems so we can provide the necessary support and training our instructors need to be successful. Even so, with about 88 teachers in the program and approximately 9500 students, we do have a teacher or two each year who goes off the map, failing to complete program requirements. When this happens, we either bring in a successful teacher to co-teach or do mop-ups through independent studies. Not ideal, but inevitable unless you want to disenfranchise the classroom teacher and follow more of a distributed assessment model.

            What bothers me most about Adams’ essay, though, is his inexcusable descent into self pity. I mean, rather than whining about the lack of mentoring he received back in “those days,” I would prefer to read reports on the truly exciting changes that have taken place in higher education when it comes to composition studies.  If he wants to keep his academic telescope focused on the Elite National University galaxy, maybe he could talk about work with new media in composition courses at Stanford, or the theme/disciplinary based courses at Duke, or the research being conducted at the Harvard Writing Project, or ways senior faculty work with freshman and their writing at Cornell. Ten minutes on Google and he could move beyond moralistic platitudes.

Rather than assuming that all first-time teachers are frauds–the worst-case scenario whether we are talking about Elite National Universities or Big State Universities–let us take a good look at the positive contributions of our universities and graduate students. Extensive mentoring programs are now commonplace. Graduate students are using commons-based peer production technologies to collaborate on shared pedagogies and program policies (see, e.g., http://collegewriting.us or http://writing.colostate.edu/). Students are using collaboration tools such as blogs and wikis to markup one another’s texts; they are publishing their eportfolios online; they are finding public venues for their essays rather than producing work solely for teachers. And students are writing everywhere, on their iPhones, netcomputers, and laptops. In turn, graduate students are working with faculty to produce just-in-time textbooks that meet the particular needs of particular writing programs. Writing programs are aggregating assessment data across hundreds of sections of courses rather than looking at small samples. We are undergoing a major paradigm shift in Composition Studies. As a result, first-year composition programs are becoming more responsive, rigorous, and inspiring.

Sure, we have a long ways to go when it comes to helping faculty across disciplines understand that undergraduate student writing is not merely the English department’s problem, yet universities, from no-name to elite schools, have made enormous strides in improving writing instruction. Rather than obsessing about what we should have done in the past, let us worry about what we need to do to better prepare our students and the next generation of teachers.  Then, as we look back at our careers from Henry Adams’ critical perspective, perhaps we will see an educational environment where not only pedagogy is mature, but students are thankful for our direction and encouragement.