Monthly Archive for September, 2011

Assessing the value of the Social Media Expert

Published
by
Craig
on September 30, 2011
in Social Media
. 0 Comments

I had the privilege of attending the annual Online News Association conference in Boston from Sept. 22-24 and I learned several things that I’ll put to use in my work on East20sEats.com and Dollars & Sense (both run by Baruch College’s Department of Journalism and the Writing Professions, where I am an adjunct). However, my biggest takeaway was that no one has any real, specific advice when it comes to building a fan or follower base on various social networks. Oh, they’ll tell you how great Google+ Circles are and how Twitter is where real news comes from nowadays, but when it comes to maximizing your outreach the advice gets vague in a hurry:

Be passionate about your subject matter. Be a part of the community. It’s a conversation not a lecture.

Aren’t those the same things that people in the know have been saying about journalism as a whole for at least 7 years?

That’s not to say there’s no value in hearing from those who have built huge “personal brands” — as much as I hate the term — on social media. There are lessons to be learned from sharing success stories. But, as I found in the social media and branding session, those who have made it work don’t sit around examining why it worked. They don’t have time to because they’re too busy doing it.

And that’s why it’s become clear to me that there’s no such thing as a social media expert, at least as it pertains to the analysis of its uses in the professional world. There are people doing great work who have built a large following around that work, but only the rare breed of self promoter can achieve social media celebrity simply by talking about the merits of existing social media over the medium of existing social media. Because at the end of the day, what’s the point?

To me, the beauty of Facebook, Twitter and others lies in three facets, all of which render the alleged social media expert useless.

First, they’re easy to use. It doesn’t take a specialist to set up a Facebook account and upload photos, or to write in under 140 characters at a time.

Second, and most important, the experience of social networking is different for every user. That’s why asking someone at Aviation Week for specific examples of how to build a follower base is useless when you run a foodie site.

Third, social media is inherently self-propagating. By their very nature, these platforms create huge networks of people who will keep you apprised of the latest trends in social media.

So if those three things are true, what’s the value of the social media expert? Is it to sing the gospel of Facebook, Google and Twitter? That seems unnecessary when each of these outlets boasts hundreds of millions of users. As Peter Shankman of HARO (Help a Reporter Out) wrote in May, “Being an expert in social media is like being an expert at taking the bread out of the refrigerator. You might be the best bread-taker-outer in the world, but you know what? The goal is to make an amazing sandwich, and you can’t do that if all you’ve done in your life is taken the bread out of the fridge.”

Shankman was writing from a marketing perspective, but the concept holds true in journalism (or any other field, for that matter). You still have to do good reporting for anyone to care.

Putting the “expert” label on social media work just discourages potential in-house users and encourages companies to seek out expensive consultants, when all they really need is the slightest bit of tech savvy and a willingness to play around in the medium to find out what works for them.

You don’t need a social media expert, and you certainly don’t need to become a social media expert. You need to become an expert in your field who actively uses social media and isn’t afraid to experiment in its new forms. As American University professor David Johnson said in a pitch for an “unconference” session that unfortunately didn’t get picked up: “It’s not the medium, it’s the message.”

Granted, you can’t ignore the power of Facebook or Twitter, both as a marketing vehicle and as a way to bring more voices to the reporting process. But it’s 2011. Hopefully you don’t need a self-anointed guru to explain that.

My sister can’t read this post

Published
by
April
on September 28, 2011
in Technology
. 3 Comments

Neither can my father, although both are proficient readers. My sister and her family have multiple televisions, cable, a gaming system and most recently, they have acquired cell phones (the un “smart” sort), but they do not own a computer. This is not their choice. They are regular hard working people, laboring in the service sector in long-held stable, but low paying jobs. They worry about paying for a serviceable car, not the web. Typical of many working class people, they are much less connected to the world through the internet than are their wealthier and more educated peers.

In fact, they are not connected at all. I am their connection to a digital landscape they keep hearing about but have never seen themselves. They have never seen Facebook, and Google is not one of their verbs. They call me weekly, sometimes daily, for info they don’t have access to, from answers to health questions, to vender and business info, to info about my nephew’s public school, to local news in my sister’s small town, to trivia.

We are not alone in this arrangement. Like many first-generation college graduates, I oscillate between these disparate social spaces — fast enough sometimes to affect a sense of self and identity — moving forward and backward between digital and analog, the material and theoretical, filial and heretical, oral and textual traditions and cultures, though “native” to none.  Being a doctoral student associated with a university continues to digitally connect, arrange and organize me. Social stratification in access to the expansive communicative vehicles and habitats that are encompassed by the terms “social media,” “information technology,” or “digital tools” exacerbate and further entrench the other multitude of ways that I am distinguished/marked from my family of origin. Such digital resources (informational as well as tool-based) guide and color the way we think and live, shape the very way we come to understand ourselves. What are the consequences of this class-stratified access to information, knowledge and tools?

Luke has previously posted this Michael Wesch video in his discussion of the new media revolution and its promise of greater social connectivity. I think it’s worthwhile to repost Wesch’s “Web 2.0 … The Machine is Us/ing Us” here as a dramatic accounting of the potential deprivation that digital exclusion represents.

Panic arose while viewing this video as I newly considered the degree of impoverishment faced by those of us (i.e., my family) who are absent from this “revolution,” who don’t “teach the machine,” who are not tagging, or naming, the (digital) world, who shape it by their absence from it, who become more invisible, less active social participants even as others become more productive and more participatory in our society. Indeed, “we will need to rethink a few things,” particularly equality, democracy, citizenship.

Working-class studies scholar, Denise Narcisse  details the issues and consequences surrounding the protracted and growing digital inequality faced by the poor and working class in the U.S. Both Sherry Linkon and Jane Van Galen take up this discussion in subsequent blog posts, outlining the challenges of integrating new media and digital tools at their campuses, and in their classrooms, when their student bodies disproportionately come from working class families and communities.  All of the hardships they detail for the student populations the work with are even less surmountable for those outside of a school system, with more limited access to digital technology. As a student and employee within the university setting, I have been honing my meta medium capacities for some time and on multiple levels: content, context, medium, form, speeds — most of my family are a full 5 steps back in the “meta media fluency” endorsed by Gardner Campbell.

A case in point: This summer, my father conferred with me about which laptop he should buy, now that he could afford one. I was at a complete loss of how to advise him, especially given that we live on opposite sides of the country and navigate a technological knowledge gap between us that feels even greater. He was silent at my suggestion to head to a decent retail store and trying some out. When I then suggested that he explain to the sales staff that he is a new user, he promptly cut me off and suggested to me that they would have to pick themselves up off the floor laughing. I then realized that he actually has a lot of shame around his lack of knowledge and previous inexperience, and had come to me for real help. I then dutifully identified a highly rated, moderately priced notebook, printed out the reviews and specs, and snail mailed it to him with a print out of where he could purchase it in person. Two weeks later, he was completely technologically up to date in terms of hardware — he even has a mobile hotspot.

It is fall now, and he has yet to get online, access email, see the world through the web. Despite that year of Geek Squad service he purchased, his contract with a major ISP, and at least one member of his immediate family with passable digital competencies, he is still living in a very different social world from the majority of Americans overall – though very much as many working class Americans do. Perhaps that’s not a bad thing, as suggested by this recent Toyota commercial, which privileges material world pursuits over cyber ones in their efforts to sell a SUV.

Turns out, if given the choice between a new car or a new computer system, my sister would take the car, reasoning that a computer was a luxury. I say, it depends on who you ask.

Don’t Mistake Exhaustion for Apathy

Published
by
Jonathan Stillo
on September 27, 2011
in CUNY, EdTech, Education and Politics
. 0 Comments

In a previous post Luke asked the important question “where are the students?” regarding why there is not popular outrage at tuition hikes following Boone who wondered why students are not demanding a better, cheaper alternative to the expensive and uninspiring Blackboard software that students are forced to pay for and professors are pressed to use.  I was disappointed to see that no one in the comments mentioned what makes CUNY students different than those at other universities and why it actually makes perfect sense that they are not occupying buildings in light of the constant tuition increases as well as reductions in services and course offerings that are happening across the City University system, let alone taking an interest in what information technology platforms the university is using. In fact, I imagine most students have no idea that alternatives to Blackboard even exist. What they do know is that they like having their readings easily accessible online rather than going to the library, making photocopies or buying a textbook.

345/365 touch-up
Until recently, this is what “blackboard” meant to me…

Creative Commons License photo credit: kharied

I was slow to put mine up this semester and was surprised to see emails from students demanding it be put up. “Why? I emailed you the readings…” I thought to myself. There is a more important issue here though than simply student apathy whether it is economic and political or related to their lack of preference for open source software. It is more about class and race than anything else. I don’t want to come off as dismissive. Educational technology is important, the tuition hikes are out of control and I too want students taking action and demanding better. I will offer a possible explanation as to why they are not using an anthropology class I taught last semester as an example:


Creative Commons License photo credit: emokr

The class filters slowly into the stuffy, windowless room at John Jay. “Why is it always so hot in here?” I think to myself. There are 36 students registered for my class and to my pleasure/exhaustion  everyone’s attendance is great. An African American women in her early thirties rushes in comes in, flustered. A shy little boy peeks from behind her leg.  The baby-sitter has cancelled and she doesn’t know what to do and asks if her child can sit in on the class. I think to myself that surely there is a university protocol concerning this, but I do not know it. The little boy quietly sits in the back row, next to his mother playing with a cell phone and I begin teaching. In short, there are virtually no “traditional” students to be found. There are, however, many single mothers who have to miss class when the baby sitter cancels or when the child gets sick. Everyone in this room works, and they work harder than me their professor. I always say that CUNY students are special. Many of them have hard lives, in this particular class about 10% of the students are white and most of their parents never went to college. They range in age from scarcely 18 to 58, many were born outside of the country and most of their parents never went to college.   There is one white male in the room besides myself and he is a middle-aged former nurse who wants to go back to school to become a substance abuse counselor.  For many, English is not their mother-tongue.

There are two young Latinos in the class who work as security guards. One works overnight shifts at a factory and then comes directly to my class. Sometimes he falls asleep.  The other works at a hospital and when his “relief” does not show up he is not allowed to leave. He does not have a choice, his is the only income his mother, sister and her child have. They all live together in a small apartment. These students are just scraping by. They work hard, and face significant challenges. For them, life gets in the way of the possibilities of campus activism. Even the textbook (which I specifically chose because it was older and more affordable) proved too expensive for a couple students who privately, and with a great deal of embarrassment, told me that they couldn’t pay for it. In the end, I loaned them my copy and then felt guilty how thankful they were saving them $30.

I have to admit, I fell in love with these students. I marveled at their hardships and how they were pulling themselves up from poverty and getting an education. I was proud of them, impressed that they found time to take summer internships and how serious they were to graduate.  No one in my family has graduated college and will be the first (and probably last for a long time) to get a PhD. The CUNY system is one of the few places where I believe the American Dream, at least for the time being, is alive and well. Where students from the working class, and especially minority students can access an affordable, quality education.  The fact is, even in light of recent cuts, CUNY still costs far less than most universities.

The CUNY legacy is one of providing education to students who could not otherwise attain it. Indeed, it was free of charge until 1975, a fact I proudly tell my students to let them know that they are at a university with a history they should be proud of.  In 1920 80% of the students at City College and 90% of those at Hunter College were Jewish (Steinberg 1989:137), at a time when Columbia University was actively restricting Jewish enrollment using a redesigned application which asked for religion, father’s name and birthplace, a photo and a personal interview (Synott 1986: 239-240 cited in Sacks 1998: 82).

Today, it is a different set of students who need the boost to middle class life that an education can provide. The students I teach at John Jay as well as those in many of the other CUNY schools, especially at the community colleges face challenges unknown to middle and upper class white students attending more traditional colleges across the country. For the majority of the students I know, there are no dorms, frat parties—no campus life at all aside from the library and cafeteria. One simply goes to class and then rushes to work or back home to their children. This is a far cry from better funded, whiter, more upper-class colleges where the feel is more “low-stakes”  and about self-discovery. While for many CUNY students, especially in the community colleges, what is at stake is the well-being of their families and there is no room for error.

A comparison of CUNY students to those in Europe protesting is not fair. First, European students are much less likely to work during school than their American counterparts. Secondly, The Spanish protests were about far more than education costs, they were about the very fabric of society and the lack of opportunities for young people, who are now unemployed and living with their parents at record numbers even into their early thirties. Spain has the highest rate of youth unemployment in the European Union (43%) and this generation is called “ni-ni” –they neither work nor go to school. The situation is bad in America, but not comparable to what is happening in Spain, Italy and Portugal to name a few. The Spanish unemployed youth do not even have the opportunity to be overburdened by their jobs, as they cannot find any.

These economic and time constraints place significant limits on the sorts of activism many students can engage in. In fact, in class discussions, many students expressed serious frustration with recent tuition hikes of 15% in 2009 and 7% this year, but those students who are hurt the most by these hikes are also the ones who are working multiple jobs and supporting other family members. I don’t want to go quite so far as to say that activism is a privilege of the middle and upper classes, but I will say that most of the students I know cannot take the risk of getting arrested to protest a tuition increase of a few hundred dollars, nor can they get the time off from their jobs or hire a baby sitter to watch the kids while they march in the streets, let alone to pay lawyer’s fees should they be arrested—a much more common trend in the post 9-11 years. New York City has become a much less welcoming place to protest. I remember 1997 and 1998 marches and they had a different character to them with more arrests, more barricades and more pepper spray.

Police Lines
Creative Commons License photo credit: Holster®

The lack of militancy of these students is not surprising.  I want to see them marching in the streets demanding that education be a priority, demanding that CUNY continue being a place working class and minority students can get an affordable, quality education. I want students to take ownership and care about every detail of the university, but I do not think many have the time to do this. So while the students should be protesting tuition hikes, maybe the professors should be the ones protesting Blackboard software and the costs in terms of dollars, as well as lack of portability and doing a better job inspiring our students to take demand better from the state and the university.  So I will ask: Where are the professors?

The War on Cliché

Published
by
Pamela
on September 26, 2011
in Education, Faculty Development, Language, Pedagogy, teaching, Writing and Writing Instruction
. 1 Comment

Throughout history, student writers have used generalizations. In society today, everybody likes to make broad, sweeping statements and to repeat clichés. As the saying goes, great writing is timeless. At the end of the day, avoiding cliché is easier said than done.

In nearly a decade of teaching college writing, I have encountered thousands of variations on the above statements.  I might even go so far as to say that the vast majority of students I have worked with rely heavily on generalization and cliché when writing essays, or at least when composing first drafts. When I first began to notice this pehnimenon, I was baffled, and, honestly, a little angry. Why were students subjecting me to essays that said nothing new about anything?

When I talk to other faculty, they often express the same confusion: why do undergraduates feel the pressing need to talk about what has been going on since the dawn of time? And, more importantly, how can we stop them?

My early attempts to battle this kind of language failed miserably. I would mark papers with vague terms like “vague” or highlight a passage and write a general phrase like “general.” I might even circle a cliché and write, “Avoid cliché.” None of this had any effect, so I began devoting class and conference time to more specific explanations along the lines of “your essays should be specific.” Yet still I received papers that began as does this sample essay on The Great Gatsby: Many Americans long for a big house and lots of money. This is the American Dream. The American Dream is what Americans quest for.

what's left to draft
Creative Commons License photo credit: remediate.this

Lately I have changed tactics. I am waging war on cliché, and my first strategy is frankness. Confronting students honestly about how awful this kind of writing has yielded surprisingly frank response form students: many admit they know exactly what they’re doing, they just don’t know how to fix it. Consider the following conversation with the author of the above “American Dream” author.

Me: (underlining every sentences) None of this is necessary, because you aren’t saying anything new or interesting about America, and you repeat yourself over and over. It’s all just….
Me in my head: Be Nice! Don’t say bullshit filler nonsense. Don’t say bullshit filler nonsense.
Student: It’s just bullshit filler nonsense.

When a student comes out and admits to writing filler, I feel elated, because admitting you have a problem is the first step to recovery. Another oft-copped-to issue is not having anything to say.  Here is another sample conversation with a student author who constructed her essay around the thesis “The Great Gatsby teaches us that money doesn’t buy happiness.”

Me: Did you really have to read Gatsby to learn that money doesn’t buy happiness? Had you never heard that before encountering this novel?
Student: (sheepishly) No.
Me: Do you think Fitzgerald wrote the great American novel just to prove an old saying?
Student: Not really
Me: So why do you want to write a whole paper around this idea?
Student: I didn’t know what else to say.

So why do students feel like they have nothing else to say, and why do they continue to write bullshit filler nonsense even when they recognize it as such? The reasons are, of course, complex; below are possible explanations–starting points to help understand why it is so difficult to move beyond trite language.

1. Students are told to generalize.
When I was in sixth grade, I learned that essays should look like an hourglass: the introduction and conclusion should be general, whereas the body of the essay is where I give specific examples.  My students often repeat this lesson: an intro needs to generalize, because you can’t just launch straight into your evidence. And this is quite true. Problems arise , however when students interpret “general” to mean “the whole wide world,” rather than “this paper in general.” An introduction needs to tell the reader what a paper is going to say in a general way. For example, “This essay explores the problems professors face in communicating why cliché is an ineffective rhetorical strategy” is a general statement at about the right scale for an introduction.  However, when we tell students to make their introduction general as a way of easing the reader in, they turn to the entire world, which is a difficult entity to sum up in a few words.

I like to tell a class, “I release you from the burden of having to talk about everybody in the universe! Don’t worry about the whole of history, just worry about your paper!”  I think this should come as a relief, but nobody ever looks comforted by these words. Instead they seem confused. Which leads us the my second point:

2. Professional writers and scholars generalize all the time, so why can’t students?
I recently asked my students to read a Michael Pollen essay that claims certain farming practices have shaped the American diet and led to the obesity epidemic. Pollan stakes a large-scale claim about American food culture, but he does so within an accepted rhetorical framework.  Students asked to make similar claims about food culture might simply say it differently, noting that “People eat too much fast food,” or “Farming is important to society.”

The difference between the students’ claims and Pollan’s lies in a very particular manipulation of language: Pollan generalizes about specific society (America in 2011) and specific farm practices (i.e. the overproduction of certain crops like corn). Recognizing the difference between these types of generalities comes with experience reading criticism. Writing in a way that recognizes that difference requires even more experience with cultural studies. Pollan is just such an experienced author, and so he deploys generalization to construct an actual argument about agricultural corporate organization and its effect on how consumer attitudes towards food. I trust that his statements will be backed up with actual evidence, including studies and writing, and that he has spent hours analyzing data to come to this conclusion. Of course, an undergraduate writer has not put in the labor reflected in such nuanced generalization, and so cannot manipulate language quite as deftly. Which brings me to a final observation.

3. Constructing an original argument is a skill.
Differentiating between pointed and pointless statements means having a point of view.  Assignments frequently ask students to state a claim—articulate a thesis—and argue in support of that claim. Coming up with a good claim is daunting, but if the claim is something we pretty much accept is true—that, say, food is important to society or that Americans want to achieve the American dream—then a student can’t “do it wrong.”

Again, releasing students from burden might not be helpful: if I say go ahead, do it wrong, say whatever you want to say about this topic, I get a surprised reaction. “You want to hear MY opinion?” And of course, I’m not interested in opinion, I’m interested in argument. Tell me your analysis, tell me your interpretation, tell my your reading of the material. And here is the crux of the problem: not knowing the difference between fact, opinion, and analysis/interpretation makes it difficult to have an original point of view. First-, second-, and even third-year undergraduates might not yet have a firm grasp on exactly what it means to analyze as opposed to repeat facts or give opinions; that’s in part what they are in college to learn. It takes time and effort to develop these skills. And so those of us who teach writing have no quick fix. In some ways, we have to take a step back from the educational process, be active witnesses, let young writers figure out for themselves what is cliché and what is innovative, what is summary and what is interpretation. Yet all the while we can encourage original thought. Rome wasn’t built in a day, but hard work pays off. And as they say, slow and steady wins the race.

Interactive Fiction

Published
by
Christopher Silsby
on September 23, 2011
in Media and Technology
. 0 Comments

The other day, a story came across my newsfeed that caught my attention: The King of Shreds and Patches, a new work of “interactive fiction” by Jimmy Maher, was being released for the Kindle. This news should not have elicited a strong response from me, even with its reference to Shakespeare. After all, I like to think of myself as an old-school computer game aficionado (read: nerd), and “interactive fiction” was nothing new. Long before computers could display the immersive, three-dimensional worlds of the currently popular Halo franchise, before even the side-scrolling two-dimensional triumph of Nintendo’s Super Mario Brothers, even before the disorienting dimensionality of Pac-Man (Was the maze an overhead view or ground plan? If so, why do we see Pac-Man and the ghosts in profile?) there was the genre of the text adventure.

The initial page for Colossal Cave/Adventure

This origin of this genre is shrouded in mystery, so much so that there is not even agreement on the first game’s title. Sometimes it was known as Colossal Cave, other times merely Adventure—an unassuming name that belies its importance in the history of the genre. However it was titled, this text adventure required players to read screens full of descriptions as they descended into a seemingly endless cavern (actually, the game only contained 130 pages of rooms, but it seemed endless). Players would then interact with the text by typing their own instructions that directed the narrative, such as examine lamp, go south, take box, or use key. The grammar of the interaction wasn’t very complex, only two word phrases consisting of verb-noun, but it did allow for open-ended attempts to make the computer “understand” the player’s intentions.

 

Infocom Hitchhiker's Box Front

The box (including a bit of advice) from my favorite text adventure

 

For me, the pinnacle of the text adventure genre will always be Infocom’s adaptation of Douglas Adams’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. There were other text adventures by Infocom that I played, like the extremely popular Zork series or the supposedly simpler Wishbringer, but the game based on Douglas Adams’s very English science fiction humor radio plays and novels captured my attention in a way no other game has. With a more highly developed language parser than Colossal Cave/Adventure, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy was able to take complex, more natural language, instruction from the player. Many of the puzzles in this game required sentences with multiple subjects and direct or indirect objects. The level of interactivity even included the game making fun of the player for misspellings or grammar mistakes (at one point, the game cannot advance until the player completes a subplot based on a typo that concludes with the admonition, “You have destroyed most of a small galaxy. Please pick your words with greater care.”). Text adventures became one of my favorite genres of computer games. Not only did most of them play perfectly well on my older computer, but they seemed to me to be deeper and better written than most of the high-graphics games of the early nineties which mainly consisted of running and jumping. The niche genre has continued to exist, even in the age of games with cinematic graphics. Although no longer called text adventure, “interactive fiction” continues to be written and published on the internet.

Choose your own adventure

A well-worn Choose Your Own Adventure book

Up to now, I have been writing about games played on a computer. Interactive fiction exists in non-digital form, too. When I was young, I checked out every Choose Your Own Adventure book that our local libraries stocked. Written in second-person perspective, every few pages these books would present the reader a choice of two or more actions with directions to turn to a specific page depending on which action was chosen. This series changed my relationship to reading. No longer was the reader beholden to the order set down by the author or publisher, starting at page one and reading through to the end. They were required to physically manipulate the book, turning back and forth, bookmarking particularly difficult choices in order to try all alternatives. Interactive reading was not relegated to the virtual world of the computer, but could travel with you in the form of a very well-thumbed paperback.

Nabokov at Stella's

Interactive literature, the later years

When I became too old for the reading level of the Choose Your Own Adventure series, I thought my tastes had matured. But in college, I was giddy to discover Nabokov’s Pale Fire, a more highbrow, literary version of interactive fiction. In a complex shadow of my techniques for dealing with the multiple paths of my childhood’s Choose Your Own Adventure books, I followed the footnotes left by “Kinbote,” bookmarking page after page in the futile attempt to find my way back from running off after a sub-footnote to a digression. No two experiences, except perhaps a boring straight-through reading or a very systematic approach, of Pale Fire would be the same.

As I entered more serious academic studies, the source of Nabokov’s humor for his novel in endless footnotes became apparent. I would find myself tracking source after source, reading footnote references sometimes more intently than the article to which those little superscript numbers were attached. Was this also a form of interactive literature?

Pardon my digression—the influence of a certain Dr. Charles Kinbote, perhaps?—but originally I was writing about my surprise at being surprised by Jimmy Maher’s The King of Shreds and Patches. Obviously, there have been over thirty years of computer games within the interactive fiction genre. There also exist books that utilize a similar interactive structure, requiring choices to be made by the reader. And in my research, “engaging with the text” became a key tool of the trade. Therefore, novelty was not the reason that this particular work caught my attention.

Was it the fact that this was an ebook, rather than a computer “game” or traditional “book” where I had seen this interactivity before? No, I had seen other interactive ebooks on other devices. I am thinking specifically of the iPad with its touchscreen interface. The iPad has plethora of children’s ebooks that border on fully animated cartoons. There are also annotated Shakespeare titles that allow for pop-up line notes, instantaneous modern language translations, or dictionary definitions of obscure Elizabethan terms. You can take extensive notes and mark up the page of a book using your finger, a stylus, or keyboard. While the Kindle does allow for rudimentary note-taking and highlighting, ebooks on an iPad are much more “interactive” than this one.

The Suck

Consumption technology?

Why, then, did this particular title catch my attention? To answer this, we must look to the marketing of the iPad and the Kindle. In the past few years, media technology has been divided into two categories: media production and media consumption. The desktop and laptop computers are classified as “production” technology—those devices designed for writing, editing, publishing, and generally creating works. “Consumption” technology—like the mp3 player, ebook reader, or video playback device—are for listening, reading, or watching the media created on “production” technology. In between, but still leaning toward “consumption,” are smartphones and tablets—while still primarily used to receive media, these devices are capable of some level of “production.” If Maher had released his work a smartphone, tablet, or computer, I would not be as likely to have noticed. This is evidenced by the fact that earlier versions of The King of Shreds and Patches were originally published for computer and even won interactive fiction industry awards, and yet it did not grab my attention.

Cognitive dissonance caused me to pay attention to this new “ebook.” Years of marketing and specific use as a “consumption” technology trained me to think of the Kindle as a passive distributor of media. I had attempted to buy one a while back, but the inability to take handwritten marginal notes—a very academic form of low “production” technology necessary to grad school reading—made me look to tablets for my particular ebook needs. I had written off the Kindle as incapable of “production” technology. Therefore, when I read about The King of Shreds and Patches where the reader has some control over the narrative, the astonishment came from my perception that a “consumption” device has transformed—even if ever so slightly—into a “production” device.

Now the question remains, is this a game or a book? Am I playing or reading? As the clear lines between production and consumption technologies blur, the terms we use to describe our modes of interaction also change. I had no doubts in writing the above sections that I was “playing text adventure games” and “reading Nabokov’s book,” but Maher’s ebook confuses things. On Amazon.com, the work is marketed as “an interactive novel for Kindle.” While on the writer’s website, it is alternately described as a “game file” and “story file,” both of which are “played,” rather than “read.” Maybe you “play” the story as you play a drama rather than a game. Or, perhaps, in the end, I will just end up playing it on a laptop while reading it on a Kindle.

Photo Credits: Colossal Cave/Adventure, from Wikimedia Commons. Hitchhiker’s Guide, photo credit: John Morton. Choose Your Own Adventure, photo credit: Ian Kershaw. Pale Fire, photo credit: mabel.sound. Consuming Technology, photo credit: Big Fat Rat. King of Shreds and Patches, credit: Antiquarian Productions.

Where are the students?

Published
by
Luke
on September 21, 2011
in cac, EdTech and Education
. Closed

Dimension
Creative Commons License photo credit: ShuttrKing|KT

Boone’s post about Blackboard as an impetus behind his turn to open source software development got a lot of attention on Monday, and for good reason. He struck a fine balance between deep knowledge, a moral center, and a progressive stridency that many of us who are doing work at the intersection of technology and higher ed aspire to but rarely achieve. It’s ideological, for sure, but its ideology is a simple one: Blackboard is ripping off students by locking the institutions responsible for nurturing their development as thinkers and makers into an expensive relationship with a software whose design is hostile to thinking and making. That’s troubling enough. But, as Boone notes, it’s doubly troubling at a place like CUNY, where the vast majority of students have few choices when it comes to higher education.

Boone’s piece resonated with educators and developers who like to think deeply about this stuff, and kicked off a series of exchanges on Twitter about how we might translate broad anger against Blackboard into some kind of transformative action. And yet, a significant piece is absent from the puzzle: there seems to be little student outrage over the fact that Blackboard is the default option for teaching and learning with technology at CUNY and so many other places.

Is it important that undergraduates know the details on this stuff? Or is this situation more akin to a faculty member choosing texts for a class, an act of tuition and fees paid along with faith that the “experts” will act in the best interests of the students?

Honestly, I’m not sure. I find it more concerning that I’m not sure students care to know. CUNY undergraduates have barely made a whimper since their tuition was raised 15% in 2009, and 7% this academic year, with promises of additional hikes each of the next four years. There were some scattered student protests: an internationalist group and marxist social workers at Hunter organized a rally. I heard a rumor, unconfirmed, that A group of anarchists at Queens College stopped traffic on the L.I.E. to protest the hikes. But there’s been nothing across campuses, nothing sustained, and the loudest protestors, as always, are CUNY Grad Center students, who are often steeped in the history of protest (especially at CUNY) but who only make up a sliver of the student population. Compared with students in Europe, American students show few signs of organizing and making demands.

If CUNY’s undergrads aren’t motivated to oppose such steep tuition hikes, it’s hard to imagine that they’d deeply engage with the types of ed tech decisions made by the University. Would CUNY actually jettison a relationship with a corporation to which it has outsourced so much of its thinking about teaching and learning with technology without students demanding it? CUNY is a huge bureaucracy, and getting it to change direction is a monumental task.

I’m fortunate enough to have carved out a niche with other like-minded educational technologists and digital humanists at the University where we can think deeply about and create alternative structures for the exploration of the way that technology is changing teaching, learning, and scholarship. My project is funded directly by the student technology fee, a fact that I’m proud of. Our campus puts its plan for the tech fee online for all to review, and it’s a symbol of enlightened leadership that we’ve been given the space to experiment. Still, there’s little evidence to assume that most CUNY students know or care about the substantial fees paid by CUNY to Blackboard, or the much more exorbitant costs of the CUNY First ERP transition, or (despite our recognition) how much bang for the buck projects like Blogs@Baruch, The CUNY Academic Commons, and ePortfolios@Macaulay deliver.

Our innovations remain on the edges of the University. In some ways, to be honest, that’s preferable — we don’t have as much pressure to scale and as a result we have both less scrutiny and greater ability to respond nimbly to changes on the ground. If we had more resources and a bigger mandate, our work would change significantly. But at the end of the day, CUNY students are still sending a significant chunk of money to Blackboard without any say, and the overwhelming majority of faculty members aren’t thinking through the pedagogical implications of a continued client-service model of educational technology.

So we can be proud of the critique we’ve waged and the alternatives we’ve constructed. But Boone’s post reminds us in the starkest terms that we’ve not accomplished nearly enough. We have more to do. But so do our students. They can start by asking some questions, and hopefully, down the road, making some demands.

At Home in the City

Published
by
Ben Spatz
on September 20, 2011
in Art, Audience, BLSCI, Cross-Cultural Communication, Culture, CUNY, Media, New York and Politics
. 0 Comments

Finding a place to live is a complicated, essential, bittersweet, sometimes unexpectedly profound part of living in a big city. Having spent the past two weeks touring Brooklyn in an apartment search, I feel newly connected and newly aware of the patchwork fabric of diversity and interconnectedness that is our shared urban world.

apartment (noun): a suite of rooms forming one residence; a flat. ORIGIN: from Fr. appartement, from Ital. appartamento, from appartare ‘to separate’.

To separate. Our shared need for distance allows us to remain together. In cities we pack closely together, our buildings made of boxes inside boxes. Apartments inside buildings, rooms inside apartments. This one is mine, that one is yours. This is the bedroom, that is the kitchen. So we keep things organized. I’ve also lived in more communal spaces, in squats and lofts and cabins. But it’s true, what they say: The older I get, the more glad I am to have my personal life boxed and protected in the confines of an apart-ment. This isn’t because I want to isolate myself from the world. On the contrary, it’s because I want my engagements in the world to extend beyond the level of neighbor and neighborhood. As a teacher, artist, and academic, I spend most of my time and energy cultivating a public existence through those larger institutional channels. At the same time, I also need a private life, an intimate life, the kind of life that can unfold within an apartment. This leaves precious little time or energy for neighbors and the neighborhood.

I’ve always romanticized cities, even though I’ve almost always lived in one. My childhood dreams and fantasies were brimming with golden and silver cityscapes inspired by films and books like The Fifth Element and Imajica. As I grew up I became more interested in actual cities, which are sometimes golden and sometimes silver but always also real and mundane and frustrating and specific and impossible to capture or describe or comprehend. During this apartment search I don’t think about the cities of my childhood imagination. I’m fixated on the realities of rent stabilization, demographics, transportation, and square footage. But afterwards, looking back, it’s clear that I have been walking through one of those cities about which I used to dream. The force of New York City no longer hits me with a single impact like the fantastic cities of literature and film. I’ve never been up into a helicopter to see it from that distance as a single glimmering artifact. But this city has something else going for it that my dream-cities never had: It’s real.

Next to the east side of Prospect Park my partner and I visit a large, high-ceilinged apartment in a vast old mansion of a building. Apparently this building is the best if you have dogs. Everyone there has dogs, and there is the botanical garden across the street where you can walk your dogs. But we don’t have a dog, and the apartment feels cold to me. It makes me think of a nineteenth century novel full of strange illnesses and ongoing, unspoken suffering in the drawing room. Even the neighborhood feels cold to me: no shops, no cafes, no restaurants. Each person alone in their apartment with their dogs. But it’s also raining that day, which makes a difference.

Close to the heart of downtown Brooklyn we discover a gem of an apartment with a small stained-glass window and old, decorative, perfectly maintained wooden doorframes. Someone has put a lot of love into this apartment and it shows. It’s priced below market rate because the bedroom is in between the living room and the kitchen and bathroom. This means that if one person is up and about, the other can have no guarantee of peace or privacy. Even so, we can’t afford it. The market has changed since we looked two years ago, and not in our favor. Now, if we want to have cafes and fresh produce nearby, we’ll have to find them the edge of the gentrification wave.

In Crown Heights, we find ourselves walking along that thin edge. In a way it seems inevitable that we will end up living along a border area like this, where class, race, and cultural history collide before our eyes. Here we can have our cafes and groceries, if we don’t mind living on a somewhat desolate street where half the block is taken up by an enormous parking garage. The apartment itself is beautiful, but is it worth pushing our budget when the subways nearby are not quite the ones that we want? As New Yorkers we are reconciled to the fact that we will spend a good portion of every day on the subway, in those moving boxes that bring us all together and carry us on our separate ways. Transportation by subway is another complex calculus to be applied to the apartment hunt: Which subways exactly, and just how far away?

We even look at one of those ridiculous new luxury buildings that claim to offer “a high-quality living experience” with gym, lounge, and optional valet parking. The cheapest studio, its price brought down to within our range by the economic travails of the past few years, is luxurious but tiny. Far worse is the feeling that living here would be equivalent to selling one’s soul, aligning oneself with all that is wrong in the world. Culturally we are as out of place here as we are in the housing projects that are hidden in plain sight, two blocks away, next to the highway. There we feel like invaders, threatening and threatened, simultaneously guilty of privilege and anxious to protect it. Here we feel something different but equally painful: This is not what buildings and apartments should look like. This is not what we — I mean all of us — should be doing with our money. This is not what we should be doing with New York City.

Differences in culture and differences in privilege map onto each other in complex and not always obvious ways. In south Williamsburg we find ourselves in a Latino neighborhood where music and advertising and signage in Spanish mark a distinct community. Two years ago we looked at an apartment in the Hasidic neighborhood next door. In both places we still feel out of place. Differences in language, clothing, and food are both personal and political. For us as a couple they are simply preferences that have emerged organically from our lives and backgrounds and interests. But we cannot pretend that in living here we would not also be part of a much larger wave of change in this area. And if it’s really a question of (white) “hipsters” vs. Latinos then we are inescapably in the category of the former. That’s how privilege works: You have to own it even if you don’t identify with it. White, male, “hipster” — I am none of these and yet I am all of them. It depends what each term means. It depends who you ask. It depends if we are talking about privilege or identification.

A few blocks away, but across the highway and a few blocks closer to Bedford Ave — the fount of this gentrification wave — we find the first apartment on which we are moved to put down a deposit. It’s smaller than the other but we have our cafes and our restaurants and our groceries. Once again we have landed right on the edge on this wave, this pattern that is beyond our control. One block away is a coffee shop dominated by famously entrepreneurial laptops. Half a block in the opposite direction, kids play basketball in the street under a string of Puerto Rican flags. So the city puts us in our place. This is the kind of neighborhood we want. And we can afford to live here, as long as we don’t mind that the kitchen floor is peeling up and there is no sink in the bathroom. From this apartment we can stage our own projects and journeys and battles with and through the city. Perhaps this is why it already feels like our home, and why my sweetheart starts kissing me when the realty agent isn’t looking. This hasn’t happened in any other apartment so far: The kissing test.

I am glad to be a new Writing Fellow at Baruch College, itself a towering vision of the contemporary city, hundreds more boxes within boxes organized to bring us together and keep us part according to the organizational system we call higher education. The architecture of the vertical campus reminds me of the towering luxury condominium in Fort Greene, but the student body is the most ethnically diverse in the nation. My first impression of the Bernard Schwartz Communication Institute is that it is much less diverse than the rest of Baruch, a subject I hope to explore in a future blog post. Nor do I feel at home in a world focused on “business” as distinct from culture, ecology, and social justice. But I do see the potential here for a new generation of thinking about communication, education, and how we choose to build our collective future. I see that this school, and CUNY in general, is the future of this city, dirty and golden and real.

IMAGE CREDITS: City from The Fifth Element (see also City and The City). “Gentrification… Just say NO” from southside rants. Gentrification diagram from Geosimulation. Avalon Fort Greene from Rent.com (see also “Suddenly, a Brooklyn Skyline”, New York Times). Cafe photograph from Atlas Cafe. “Puerto Rican flags strung across a street in South Williamsburg” from City Limits. Baruch College Vertical Campus from Architectural Record.

Conformity in the Classroom

Published
by
Chrissy
on September 19, 2011
in Education, Higher Education, Interpersonal Communication, Uncategorized and Writing Instruction
. 2 Comments

This past summer marked the 50th anniversary of Stanley Milgram’s famous Milgram obedience experiment conducted at Yale.

Considered to be one of the most notable experiments in the field of social psychology in particular, and perhaps even the research world in general, Milgram originally set out to examine the question of why people obey authority, even when doing so contradicts some of their fundamental morals and conscience. In this research, an innocent participant was given the role of a “teacher” who had to punish the confederate “student” with an alleged electric shock of increasing intensity every time the student would make an error on a memory task. The teachers were constantly prodded by the experiment to continue, despite some of their blatant resistance and genuine concern whenever the student would receive a shock. Milgram’s question: how much would people follow the command of the authority, or in this case, the experimenter, even when it meant “harming” another human being?

Although the methodology used was questionably ethical by today’s standards, Milgram’s conclusions were a shock to many: about 65% of the participants in his experiment went as far as administering the strongest voltage available.

While 50 years have passed since Milgram’s original experiment, we, as a society, would like to think that we have moved on, and that what Milgram found in his laboratory doesn’t pertain to the way we think and behave. After all, we are a society in which individualism is a value, and doing our own thing and going against authority is key. If put into that same experiment room, we would surely act much differently.

Yet has much changed? Have we really moved on and learned from research such as Milgram’? Or, is it simply human behavior to act as Milgram’s subjects did? One can hardly imagine that in today’s day and age anyone would conform to authority to such an extent that his or her own conscience would suffer. After all, we are much “smarter” today than we were back then…

In thinking about these questions, I’d like to bring attention to world of street art. Many street artists have often found their inspiration creating art that represents society’s dire dependence to authority and conformity. In their eyes, as in those of many similar skeptics, we continue to act like Milgram’s subjects, albeit in a more disguised way. We continue to obey like authority, act like everyone else, and believe it is the right way to exist. Commercialization, they argue, is simply a means to this end. We are constantly being bombarded of how we should think, feel, and act, and indeed we follow.

 

Well, there may not be anything necessarily wrong with “fitting in” to the molds society has carved out for us. In fact, sometimes it’s required. For example, take the world of business, a place near and dear to my heart as an instructor of several business classes. To be able to succeed in a place like corporate America, individuals must think, feel, and act like all others who have gotten ahead in times prior. Put in another way, individuals need to conform and obey the rules that have been set forth, leaving little room for creative expressions of individuality.

So I ask the question of how can we, educators of undergraduate students (and business students in particular) who are at the brink of entering worlds like Corporate America, properly educate students how to communicate and express themselves with their own voice, while still fitting into this mold? How can we encourage them to be their own people, but not appearing too different that they won’t be able to succeed?

As a crucial part of college education (and as other writers have noted), it is necessary to teach students the basics and have them conform the rules until some comfort is reached and students can feel confident in expressing themselves uniquely. However, based on my own experiences, it appears that students never fully disengage from this generic mold, but rather learn it and stick to it without really exploring their own selves and style. The reasons why this occurs can be plenty, ranging from specific educational experiences and instruction that has encouraged this type of communication, to fear of not landing a good job if doesn’t do exactly as told, to the external pressures of a society which (implicitly) values conformity.

Thus, despite it being over 50 years since Milgram’s original experiments, it is easy to see that perhaps very little has changed about the ways in which we, as individuals, fundamentally behave. While that research may have taught us to be more knowledgeable and stop to think before following fascist regimes, we might also want to think about the implications the research still has for other areas of our lives. As educators, it is our job to ensure that students do receive a quality education like everyone else, yet also free themselves of the confines of our instruction.

The Collective Mind: How did we get from an Acheulian axe to iPhone

Published
by
Tamilla
on September 15, 2011
in Technology, To Ponder and Tools
. 3 Comments

Consider two tools, one is a stone tool, an Acheulian axe, that has been around for at least a million years. Another is a communication tool, an iPhone, which has been around for about 5 years. Both tools have similarities – they are hand sized, fit in our palm perfectly, and are considered among the most important technologies of their days. The differences are more dramatic. The axe is made of stone and can be used for shaping, cutting, and hunting. The phone is an elaborate combination of plastics, metals, silicon and sophisticated software that allows us to take and share pictures and videos, communicate in real time, listen to music, transfer money and purchase products, check weather forecasts, play games, send texts, and place international phone calls. The possibilities of a smartphone are endless.

iX-ray
Creative Commons License photo credit: slowburn♪

How did we achieve such progress? Not easily. According to Matt Ridley, the author of “The Rational Optimist”, the stone tool was the only technology for more than a thousand millennia and the bodies and brains of prehistoric men changed faster than their tools. Only later in our history did people begin developing newer and better technologies such as the fishing rod, the wheel and agricultural tools. The rate of invention has accelerated rapidly during the past two centuries.

The development of communication technologies was central to this change.  For centuries the fastest way to deliver information was on a horseback. Still, people would wait for their mail for days, weeks and even months. The materials needed for such information dissemination were scarce too: horses were expensive, paper and ink were not readily available for everyone, and people overall had less than desired literacy levels.

The invention of Gutenberg printing press changed the way information was produced, however the dissemination of information was still relatively slow. The optical telegraph was invented in France in the 18th century. Multiple towers were built around the country. Messages were delivered by conveying visual signals: a sender would send the message; a recipient of the next tower would get the message while looking at a telescope and transfer it to a person sitting on the top of another tower and so on. On a good clear day, a message could reach from Paris to the South of France in one day, on a gloomy day it would take longer. The quality of messages was below optimal as a lot of errors were made along the way. Soon enough, optical telegraphs were replaced with electric telegraphs, and the first transatlantic message was sent in the 19th century. After that, the speed of transmitting information became faster and cheaper almost every decade. The radio, telephones, television and finally the Internet lowered the cost of communication, and made information fast and pervasive. Later, mobile technologies connected people around the world including countries that previously did not have even land lines. Faster means of communication allowed people to share ideas more easily, further accelerating the rate of technological innovation.

Ridley explores the notion of “collective intelligence” as a driver of innovation. The stone tool required the creativity and skills of one person and was made of one material – the rock. The smartphone tool needs the creativity and skills of thousands of people. Phones are made mainly of plastics, metals, ceramics and glass. To produce these materials copper, gold, lead, nickel, zinc, beryllium, tantalum, lithium, cadmium, crude oil, limestone and various liquid crystalline substances are required. These materials are mined, combined with other materials in a processing plant and shipped to the manufacturer. Software developers write various applications using computers and servers that are produced by others who use a range of materials in their work. Nano technologists, quantum physicists, inventors, entrepreneurs, marketers, advertisers and countless other people contribute to the creation of a single device.

Natural curiosity forces us to come up with better communication solutions and the advancements in communication technologies has allowed us to use our minds collectively to produce a wider range of goods. With advancements in technology we are able to create elaborate and complicated tools in a short period of time because we draw upon the knowledge of multiple people. Although no one person can recreate these tools on her own due to their complexity, the collective knowledge generated by people enables creativity and innovation. Non-experts with great ideas now find it easier to collaborate with experienced specialists, and to contribute greatly to the emergence of new technologies that may enrich people’s lives, while helping us progress even further from the Acheulian axe.

The Academic Crisis of Audience

Published
by
Sarah Ruth Jacobs
on September 12, 2011
in Education, Higher Education, Low-Stakes Writing, Pedagogy, Writing Across the Curriculum and Writing Instruction
. 3 Comments

When a tenure-track faculty member in English at George Mason publically remarks that “The student essay is a twitch in a void. A compressed outpouring of energy (if we’re lucky) that means nothing to no one,” we as educators get a sense that we are in trouble.

In “What’s Wrong with Writing Essays,” from the open-access Hacking the Academy, Mark Sample goes on to advocate for more public forms of writing as well as for repurposed essays–that is, assignments which involve critical thinking in the form of different, often mingled media.  Sample envisions his students not as “miniature scholars” but as “aspiring Rauschenbergs, assembling mixed media combines, all the while through their engagement with seemingly incongruous materials, developing a critical thinking practice about the process and the product.”

My immediate response to his derision of the essay form is ambivalent.  On the one hand, I agree that the traditional academic essay often feels alienated from audience and from author–it has a sense of being projected into the void.  On the other hand, I have written and read many well crafted essays which made me ecstatic, proud, even joyful.  There can be some great moments of discovery in the void.  However, thinking back on these, I wouldn’t call them authorless, audienceless, or monotonous.  Rather, they were all written by a student deeply engaged with the material, and they were directed to a caring faculty mentor.  The question that I would like to pose, then, is whether this is a real crisis, and if so, what are its parameters and pressures.

First of all, I would like to point out that we, at CUNY and nationwide, are in an atmosphere where higher education is increasingly being looked at in terms of its value in the job market.  Part of the reason for this is that, despite adjunctification, the price of higher education has risen quite dramatically while average wages have stagnated.  When students must break the bank to fund their education, the life of the mind begins to look like this:

In this environment, departments which don’t offer a high real world value struggle to stay “relevant.”  This has played out in particularly ugly ways as foreign language programs have been shut down and the graduate Fulbright-Hays program has been defunded.  However, it has also played out in rather positive ways as humanities scholars have woken up and realized that it is no longer enough to ventriloquize one another’s arguments in closed-access journals.

At the same time as higher education is being questioned from a financial standpoint, the ways in which knowledge is produced, evaluated, and disseminated have undergone revolutionary changes, at least for those highly fortunate ones who are literate and who have free access to the World Wide Web.  The question then becomes why people should bother going to school when they might design their own curriculum and test it out in life’s laboratory.  I would thus read Mark Sample’s provocation as a symptom of this rather painful moment–as a move to regain cultural relevance.

Communication across the Curriculum presents opportunities for students to master, interrogate, and modulate between different literacies and modes of communication.  Low and middle stakes writing in the form of private reflections or public blog posts give students the chance to situate themselves in relation to a number of different, often overlapping, networks.  Unfortunately, in academia and in life, not every task can be completed in the form of a Rauschenberg combine, a pastiche of different elements.

Yet, I would like to suggest that behind every polished product is a smoothed-over assemblage of seemingly disparate elements.  In a strong sense I agree with Sample.  As educators, one of the most valuable gifts that we can give students is the space to work through some of the tensions they feel between their own intellectual expression and the different communicative forms imposed upon it.  For example, I believe that if I am teaching a basic composition course, I do my students a disservice if I don’t teach them the standards of the college essay.  I also do a disservice to them if I reify the college essay, if I fail to discuss and critique some of the reasoning behind said standards.  In the end, though, I disagree with Sample’s final assertion that text, or specifically the college essay, cannot be ambiguous or woven from different elements.  By rejecting the essay Sample risks imposing his own hierarchy of modal value, his own idea of multimodal form, on student expression.  Although he is staging the conflict as a drama between forms, what is really at play is a drama of audience, the dramatic question being “Who will read my boring old essay?”  Behind that question lie insecurities about who is paying attention to scholars in the humanities.

The crisis of audience with regards to faculty publication is expressed in John Unsworth’s “The Crisis of Audience and the Open Access Solution” in the same Hacking the Academy collection.  Unsworth states that the “humanities scholar…has an imaginary audience” and offers hope that this imagined audience might materialize through open access publishing.  Our urge to publicize and “make relevant” our own work to wider audiences has been catalyzed by the demands and skepticism of students; as a result, many faculty members have begun to craft lesson plans and assignments involving analyses of popular culture and appeals to non-academic audiences.

Are public, repurposed, or popular culture assignments a solution to the ennui of academic writing?  Yes, inasmuch as they guide students in the development of their intellectual identity and in their comfort with different modes of communication.  Ideally, such assignments would help students develop their voice and situate themselves in various forms of communication so that they might forge their own purpose, their own message.  Only when that work has been done can the traditional essay form be fruitful for both faculty members and students.

One final thought:  as educators, we should strive to at least be conscious of and explicit about what pressures we are transferring onto our students, lest our own anxieties fall upon them too heavily or without explanation.