March 23, 2005

A final CCCC post, complete with podcast

Looking back on my CCCC experience this year, I can say two things with some certainty. One is that I think that we should have included the word blog in our panel title, since we ended up talking more about blogs as a site of creative computer literacy or network literacy than anything else. Two is that, if I choose to continue going scriptless, I'm either going to have to (a) learn to live with a certain level of incoherence, or (b) prepare my presentation even more than I did already. I'm not going to swear off reading, because I think I write a pretty snappy script--it's usually the delivery that I have to work on.

Anyways, for those of you who weren't able to "here" our presentation, you can now hear it, recorded in all its glory. You can hear me forget to click a couple of slides, then catch my slides up while I lose my train of thought in the process. That was a real gem. For my part, it went okay, but I felt like the threads of my talks were a little more loosely woven than I would have preferred. Ah well.

And yes, I am thinking about going into GarageBand, and futzing around a bit with my portions of the talk. Without further adieu, I present session D.24: The Aftermath of Access: From Critical to Creative Computer Literacies. Speaker 1 & 3 is Jenny Bay; speaker 2 & 4 is me. The whole session runs about 40 MB, so I've broken it into four pieces: Jenny, Collin, Jenny, and Collin.

Enjoy.

Update: Clancy just posted her account of our session...

Posted by cgbrooke at 01:33 AM | Comments (0)

S.F. Conferential

Jenny has already mentioned this, but it's worth saying twice: the set-up for the conference was abysmal.

Abysmal.

This year, many many panels were held in spaces on the edges of the big open exhibit room, separated from the exhibit space by curtains. In many of the largest rooms, the back walls were not walls, but curtains. On at least one occasion, I left a panel because I couldn't hear my own session over the sounds of another.

Unacceptable.

And this was the second year in a row where the conference was scattered socially. There was no central social space for people to hang out in, meet up with each other, or encounter each other serendipitously. On Friday, they set up tables in the upper level (for the party that night), and people flocked to them. Loud and clear, once and for all:

We would like a place where we can sit down.

I'm not talking about three tables near the coffee kiosk. Genuine social space, please. Please. Half of the fun is running into old friends, making spur of the moment plans, all the while having an anchor space where we can go with some assurance that we'll see someone we know. Two years in a row now that hasn't happened. And as a result, it feels disjointed, jumbled, and I feel like I missed seeing some people I wanted to see.

As expensive as I know it will be, I'm honestly longing for the old Palmer House. Sweet home Chicago.

That is all.

Posted by cgbrooke at 01:07 AM | Comments (2)

March 22, 2005

My Friday panels

One of the disadvantages of getting noticed is that, with the solidification of blogging as a Topic™, I found myself duplicating the experiences of other CCCC bloggers. In other words, I went to the Wednesday night session (A.15: Public, Private, Political: Social Theories and Blogging Practices) that Mike has summarized in far more detail than I could provide. And I went to the first half of B.26: Evaluating Academic Weblogs, mainly to see Derek present before I left to work on my presentation. And Mike and Clancy both have blogged that session. Since my own session was largely a haze (more on it soon), I thought I'd offer some quick thoughts on the two sessions I hit on Friday--I haven't looked around too much, but I don't think anyone's blogged them yet.

Thanks to the miracle of the Kensington wake-up system (the phone in the bathroom rings very loudly and the one by my bed was somehow not able to switch to the line where the wake-up calls came from), I was able to scrape out of bed early, and head to the Moscone for an 8am session. Despite my utter exhaustion, I didn't oversleep once.

Anyhow, I went to G.23: Rapping Down the Gate: Black Women and Hip-Hop. Two of my colleagues from Syracuse were part of the panel, and I'd met the third member of the panel last spring. Gwen Pough led off by talking about how third-wave black feminists might work to reconcile their own beliefs and attitudes with those found in the broader cultural movement of hip-hop, a movement that includes its own varieties of feminisms. My notes are sketchy, but one of the things that I remember most clearly about Gwen's talk was her insistence that we not fall into simple binaries, assuming that we can just pick and choose from a cultural movement the "good" things and critique the "bad." Elisa Norris focused more exclusively on pedagogy, and specifically attempts to draw on the resources of hip-hop in a writing classroom. One of the core moments of her presentation was an explication of a "unit" of paired readings, where through judicious footnoting, the editors clearly attempted to simplify hip-hop into good/bad and failed to question the entrenched racism of some of their so-called "explanations" of hip-hop terminology. Elisa also, I think, spoke to the rich complexity of hip-hop as a culture, a culture with a history, with varied forms of expression, and with contradictions (as there are in any culture). Elaine Richardson closed the panel by looking closely at what she called "lived experience as semantic domains." I didn't jot down the name of the novel, but she read to us a passage from a novel that highlighted the material dimensions of hip-hop as they penetrate into the everyday--hair, nails, clothes, shoes, et al. And in some ways, Elaine's paper functioned almost as an allegory for the panel itself in the sense that all three speakers brought together the often separated worlds of academia and hip-hop. In all, it was a really good panel, one that raised questions that can't really be answered in a conference session (if at all), and yet, at the same time, it felt like each speaker gave us some of the perspectives and conceptual tools to think about those questions.

And as a reward for waking up while it was still dark, I went to the MOMA. Nice.

Went back to the Moscone, and caught a 2:00 session, K.25: Researching Rhetorically: Conceptualizing and Teaching Research. I must admit, though, that the title was a little misleading. I'm the last person to push for "Monday morning" panels, but what the title didn't reveal was that the panelists were reporting on the data they'd collected about how research methodologies are taught in our field. The first and third speakers (both Carole Papper, as Becky Rickly couldn't be there) were basically Power Point driven--the data presentation in the first case, and executive summary in the third. Sandwiched between them was Clay Spinuzzi's talk, on viewing research methods as networks rather than nested category systems (paradigm -> methodology -> method -> technique). Clay argued for a much more non-hierarchical approach to crafting research, one that paid attention to rhetorical rigor rather than adhering closely to "methodological rigor." I won't repeat all of Carol's recommendations here (although I actually have pretty good notes for it--one of the benefits of PP), but I do have a couple of meta sorts of observations. Overall, I agreed with what she had to say--I still believe that we are not very good at teaching method in our field. And yet, much of the evidence that this survey seems to have marshalled doesn't actually ground the claims that they made. And the problem is that the relative absence of methodology courses isn't itself evidence for more. The shoddy quality of research in our field, on the other hand, is. But that requires us to call each other out--and I don't know who wants to do that. A few years back, I gave a paper on how problematic it was to use data gleaned from the CCCC program to make claims about the field--not that I expect anyone to have heard it, and yet, the paucity of panels in the Research Area Cluster was taken as evidence of our field's neglect of the topic. I'm probably sounding more snarky here than I mean to. But the proof of research methodology comes not from surveys, anecdotes, attitudes, or curricula. It comes in the actual research we do and the scholarship we publish it in. For all I know, that's a step that this group will take. And for all I know, they'll hold me up as someone who's not very good at research. All I know is that the difference will be found in our scholarship, and ultimately that's where the evidence for these claims has to come from.

And again, I say that as someone who agrees wholeheartedly with the claims this panel made--heck, I made some of them myself here a ways back. The one thing I disagreed with was the underlying scorn behind the claim that we were still "clinging" to methods inherited from literary study. I'd still like to see textual analysis recognized for the rigorous and at times difficult method that it can be. And it wouldn't hurt my feelings at all if, one day, some course on methodology used D&G's What is Philosophy?

Went to the Bloggers SIG Friday night, and left at 5 am Saturday morning. But those were the other sessions I went to on Friday...

Posted by cgbrooke at 11:54 PM | Comments (1)

March 21, 2005

CCCCelestial

On Friday, after going to see an 8 am panel, my friend Lorie and I went to the SF MOMA, where I saw the 2004 Exhibition of SECA award winners. One in particular caught my eye, a guy named Simon Evans. His work is a funky combination of a Dave Eggers sensibility and perhaps an aesthetic close to New Yorker cartoonist Roz Chast, with a dash of Borges' Chinese encyclopedia thrown in:

Hard to read, I know, but I haven't found too many good reproductions, and his work is new enough that I couldn't find prints. There are a couple of good pages of his work at the gallery where he's currently showing. His work was the highlight of my MOMA trip this time out. While I appreciated a lot of the other work, Evans clicked for me.

You remember Borges' encyclopedia, right? Foucault cites it in The Order of Things. In "The Analytical Language of John Wilkins," Borges describes 'a certain Chinese Encyclopedia,' the Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge, that divides animals into the following categories:

those that belong to the Emperor,
embalmed ones,
those that are trained,
suckling pigs,
mermaids,
fabulous ones,
stray dogs,
those included in the present classification,
those that tremble as if they were mad,
innumerable ones,
those drawn with a very fine camelhair brush,
others,
those that have just broken a flower vase, and
those that from a long way off look like flies.

For those of us unfortunate enough not to have a Celestial Emporium handy, I offer to you the new and improved Call for Proposals for next year's CCCC. Once upon a time, back in the day, we simply chose an "area cluster," one of 11 areas which would determine where (and by whom) our proposals would be considered.

Then they added the "level emphasis" which designates 2-year college, 4-year college, or cross-insitutional. Insofar as CCCC attempts to encourage participation from faculty at 2-year institutions, this seems okay to me.

Last year, they added the "interest emphasis," which named race/ethnicity, gender, class, sexuality, and disability as interests from which we were to choose one. This year, there were supposedly 209 panels with an interest emphasis of race/ethnicity, a fact which (I'm sure) had nothing to do with the explicit mention of race/ethnicity in the call for proposals.

This year, another category, "major focus," appears on the proposal form, which allows us, if applicable, to check basic writing, two-year college, first year composition, WAC/WID, feminist studies, or cultural studies.

Umm...what?!?!

In advance of the 2007 Call for Proposals, I'd like to suggest that, in addition to area cluster, level emphasis, interest emphasis, and major focus, another category be added called Evidentiary Inclinations, from which proposers can, if applicable, select one of the following: careful observation, dictionary definitions, thinkers whose last names begin with vowels, elegies, and, as a nod to Borges, those included in the present classification.

After all, it couldn't get much worse.

Perhaps CCCC is indeed trying to do something with this data. What they are currently accomplishing, however, is exactly the opposite. By proliferating these categories on the call itself (instead of asking for, say, 5 minutes of our time when our proposals are accepted), they are influencing the proposal process itself, in a bad way. Last year, it was pretty obvious that people felt that naming race/ethnicity as their emphasis gave them a better chance of acceptance, and unfortunately, the numbers bore that out. We don't need a more complicated formula for determining acceptance rates, and if the data isn't being used that way, then there needs to be some type of explanation on the form itself of how exactly it's being used.

And it needs to be a helluva lot more nuanced than "check one." Panels are comprised of multiple papers--is an emphasis in one paper enough to qualify the whole panel? If so, then my panel was "about" gender this time out. Which "major focus" is appropriate for a paper on using WAC strategies to help basic writers enter FYC classes sooner? And so on and so on.

I realize that CCCC is us, and I realize that I run the risk of hurting some feelings when I say this, but this trend, towards increasingly arbitrary and unclear categories, is downright stupid. If we want actual data about the conference and the presentations, then make a brief survey part of the process by which we accept our invitations. And design it better than a bunch of "check one if applicable" lines that don't come anywhere close to actually naming the range of areas covered in CCCC presentations. The implication right now is that these are "favored topics," and if they're not, it needs to say so. If they are, then it may be time for me to spend my March next year doing something else. Because my work doesn't fit comfortably (or even roughly) into any one of them.

Oh, and if we hurry, we might be able to book Simon Evans to do the cover for the 2007 program.

That is all.

Posted by cgbrooke at 05:53 PM | Comments (2)

March 15, 2005

CCCC: 8 kinds of stupid

I'm going to be throwing down some pre-dated entries here, mostly so's I can keep them relatively organized. Before I get to a few session notes, though, let me just provide the year-from-now-me with a little reminder:

Don't ever do that again!!!

Clever me, I thought that it would be nice to get into SF with a chance to do a little exploring on Tuesday. And so I went ahead and booked a flight that left Syracuse at 6:15 a.m. And since I'd probably need to get to the airport a little before 5, I should leave the apt at around 4:30, necessitating a wake-up at 3:30. So far so "good."

Compound my clever with the fact that I'm not really much of a morning person, and I decided that it was better to just stay up all night than to try and sleep a little and risk oversleeping (it's happened before). Since I wasn't really able to sleep on the plane (despite my foolish assumption that I would), I got to SF having been awake for roughly 27 hours straight. In other words, I got into SF with a chance to take a nap. Which I did. But it was a short one, and the end result was that at no time did I ever feel anything but bone-crushingly, mind-numbingly, personality-transformingly exhausted.

I never get enough sleep at CCCC. Rather than take this into account, I somehow talked myself into going there with a guaranteed sleep deficit, an energy hole that I only was able to dig deeper and deeper over the course of the next 4 days.

Yeah. That's smart.

Posted by cgbrooke at 09:53 PM | Comments (1)

April 02, 2004

CCCC, put to rest, with lots of links

Since I've seen at least one reference to my as-of-yet unfulfilled promise to report on the sessions I saw, and I did promise again last night to do this, and I need to do more with this space than whine about being depressed, and confronting the mess in my apartment is even more depressing to contemplate, I present to you my personal CCCC. For better or worse, my own account will be necessarily briefer than Mike's and others', and necessarily more oblique.

In part, this is because I only went to sessions where I knew at least one of the panelists, and in three of five cases, the entire panel. After a certain point, that's inescapable, I'm sure, but for most of us, it's intentional. It takes quite the panel and paper titles to get me to a panel where I don't know a name. And this runs up against one of my personal rules of thumb re blogging: never type anything that you wouldn't be willing to say to a body's face. I violate that rule from time to time (who doesn't?), but personally, I hate stumbling upon criticisms of myself, and I try to honor that with respect to others as a result.

My panel habits raise another issue. With one exception, I refused to attend a session whose title made reference to the conference theme. CCCC proposals are actually read by qualified reviewers, folks, and everything I've ever heard about this process supports two related conclusions: a theme-referenced title will not help a subpar proposal get accepted; the absence of such a title will not sink an otherwise-acceptable proposal. It may be that my patience is simply thinner than it was when I was a starry-eyed graduate student, but listen to me closely: none of us (myself included) is as clever as we think we are--if you can think of a way to reference the conference theme, chances are that there will be 100 other panels that do the same thing. The result is a swarm of really poorly titled panels. If you don't believe me, check out past years' programs, and see how embarrassingly bad so many of the titles seem. Takin' it to the street, anyone? Ugh.

Anyway, as I was saying, I go to panels where I know people whose work I'm interested in hearing, and for me that raises the issue of whether or not I feel comfortable being critical in public. I'm not. And part of that is that my own dread of public speaking is so great that I appreciate anyone who does it. Even an otherwise mediocre talk gets credit from me if for no other reason than that.

/stall

Okay, here's what I saw:

B.06 The ‘Edge Of Chaos’: Complexity and Emergence in Networked Composition

Michael Lasley, SU; Joddy Murray, WSU (TriCities); Joseph J. Williams, SU

You'll forgive if I don't do paper titles as well--you can always look them up. Mike talked about the role that ritual plays in the spread and emergence of cultural norms. Joddy discussed the way that working with multimedia helps students invent by situating them on the edge between order and chaos. Joe's paper I don't remember as well, in part because it was drawn from a larger project, but it seemed to me that he was talking here about redefining the notion of event in terms of complexity and networks. He can correct me if I'm off--I'm one of his readers.

The papers took on a pretty big task--referencing complexity in a field that hasn't really come to grips with it yet. On the one hand, this probably narrowed their audience--it wouldn't have surprised me to learn* that one of the questions after the session was simply "what is complexity theory?" I thought that each of them did a nice job within his particular focus, but audience members without the context that I have might have found it a little overwhelming.

C.24 Questioning Author(Ity)

Susan Adams, SU; Justin Bain, SU; Tracy Hamler Carrick, Colby College; Jonna Gilfus, SU

This panel was an iceberg tip; all four presenters were contributors (as was I) to a collection on authorship theory in composition, and their papers were condensed versions of their chapters. There was a fair amount of overlap and cohesion to the panel itself, but each of the talks was distinct. Justin talked about writing centers, Susan about gender and sexuality, Jonna about the way that our writing textbooks position students authorially, and Tracy's talk worked through a range of ideas on ownership and authorship in the classroom.

The book from which these presentations were versioned is coming out in the fall, I think, and will be well worth it. I don't say that (only) because I've got a chapter as well...The panel itself was much more intensive than the first I saw (which was very extensive)--much more overlapping, fitting together, etc.

E.26 What’s the Matter with Whiteness?: On Seeing the Interface

Laura Gurak, UMinnesota; Michelle Kendrick, WSU (Vancouver); Kris Ratcliffe, Marquette; Kathleen Ethel Welch, UOklahoma

Tough panel to summarize, because it was pretty broadly conceived. Kathleen's talk was engaging, but ranged widely and I only remember pieces. Kris talked about the challenges of getting mostly white students to acknowledge and work critically with "whiteness" in the classroom. Laura's talk revolved around the competing models of proprietary technology and open-source. Michelle focused on interface design, but I may be projecting when I say that she was drawing a connection between the "don't make me think" school of interface design and the "don't make me think" response of white students to thinking about (their own) race as a category. That's the connection I came away from her talk with, regardless.

Kathleen ran a little long, I think, and as a result, both Laura and Michelle felt rushed to me. If I hadn't already been on my feet all day, I would have been better able to draw some of the connections among their papers, and this would be more informative than it actually is. Sorry about that.

H.11 Weblogs: Exploring Contexts, Community, Collaboration, and Practice

Charlie Lowe, FSU; Clancy Ratliff, UMinnesota; Terra Williams, FSU

Lots of folks have written about this panel, either directly or obliquely, and I find that I have little else to add. It was probably the most well-attended that I attended, and it was pitched very effectively for a CCCC audience. That probably sounds like a back-handed compliment, but I don't intend it that way. My experience with technology presentations (after 10 yrs of them) at the Cs is that there's a lot of good to be found in the first couple of years' worth of papers on any phenomenon. I expect next year's blog panels to be very good, after which more advanced work will probably have to appear at C&W as the CCCC new-member-skew takes over.

Terra addressed using weblogs in the classroom, by asking students to alternate between individual and collective blogs, Charlie provided an overview of blogs as personal knowledge management, and Clancy detailed the results of a study on the gender dynamics of the "A List." I'd be less terse if their presentations weren't already linked above.

I.23 Writing Peace: Beyond the Trope of Advocacy

Diane Davis, UTexas; Cynthia Haynes, UTexas-Dallas; Victor Vitanza, UTexas-Arlington

There's no way I can give any of these three papers justice in a single sentence, so I'm not going to try. I'm sure that there were a number of audience members who had little idea what they let themselves in for by attending. Each of the papers was intricate, and carefully theoretical in different ways. The kind of presentations not for the faint of mind.

_________________________

*I should note, parenthetically, that I find Q&A time nearly unbearable. Yes, I'm one of those who gets up and leaves right after the papers are finished. Yes, I'm one of those who sits in the back specifically for that purpose. My friends by now know that this is the case; anyone who is surprised and/or offended by this shouldn't be--it's a reflection not on the panel but on my own preferences...

Posted by cgbrooke at 01:48 PM | Comments (5)

March 26, 2004

Better to have gone and left...

Today was early departure day for me. Went to a couple of morning sessions, had some lunch, and hit the road. Maybe tomorrow I'll do a session rundown--I attended five sessions, which is easily a modern-day record for me. Also momentous was that I only bought one book. There a full moon out or something?

One general sort of conclusion about the Cs this year. San Antonio is a very nice place-everything's walkable, clean, etc. But everyone I talked to had the same impression--the conference felt very spread out, and there was no real public, centering space. Most of the bars, in part bc there were so many, were small, the conference space itself was very spread out, and there were people that I didn't see that I wished I had. I'm hesitant to generalize from my experience or to blame the space, but it seemed like there wasn't a lot of opportunity for serendipitous encounters. There was no place where I could go and be relatively assured that I might run into someone.

I'm happy that they've finally reduced hotel prices by opening them up a bit for us. At the same time, it seemed like they hadn't really thought out the space, and for my money, it affected my conference experience...

Posted by cgbrooke at 10:55 PM | Comments (0)

March 25, 2004

A Margarita's Eye View of CCCC

I'm not sure that there's much more (a) you need to know, or (b) I can safely say, about CCCC. This is what Jenny and Victor looked like last night to the 60 oz. margarita they ordered and drank.

They did get to keep the glass--that's part of the deal.

Posted by cgbrooke at 09:00 PM | Comments (0)

March 24, 2004

My CCCC experience thus far, expressed as a list of bad habits, and presented in the order I foresee breaking them

1. using the whole room (Lori arrives tomorrow)
2. not bothering to shave
3. pulling caffeinated beverages from the minibar (instead of going to Eckerd)
4. paying top dollar for margaritas at dinner
5. losing my room keycard (1 down, 1 to go)
6. forgetting that people I haven't seen in a year don't "know how it goes" in my life
7. spending hours in hotel bars
8. staring just a bit too long at people I think I recognize
9. overpromising my time
10. paying for wireless access in the hotel
11. awkward conversational pauses
12. blogging

Posted by cgbrooke at 01:03 AM | Comments (0)