digital digs

teaching practices

Teaching at a comprehensive state college means participating in an institution that places value upon teaching in a way that research universities do not. Of course there is a certain irony in the expression of that value in the creation of a heavy teaching load. Yes, faculty at institutions like Cortland don't have the research pressures of our other colleagues (though as I noted in my earlier post, this is changing), but is teaching 70 or more students or having four separate preps really conducive to an excellence in teaching that this value implies?

Publishing and tenure

Stephen Shaviro discusses Lindsay Waters' new book Enemies of Promise, which brings up key points regarding the troubling state of publication in the humanities. In essence, Shaviro notes two interlocking problems: the first being increasing pressure for book publication as a tenure requirement; the second being a hyper-professionalization that carries faculty into narrower and narrower fields of study (with obviously smaller audiences).

I can see this problem here at SUNY-Cortland. I was recently approved for tenure, with a contract and a completed manuscript but no publication. I would have likely been approved without the contract, but there is growing pressure here for faculty to do scholarship, even though we in English teach a 4-3 load with heavy service obligations. It is not a matter of complaint, but just a point of reference that our recently retired chair, a full professor, never published a book. Indeed when I interviewed here, he told me that getting tenure was basically a matter of putting in the time and that one could choose to "focus" on teaching and wouldn't really have to do much scholarship at all. Obviously, that is changing here.

whither students?

Once they have graduated, whither students? Or is it wither students? This is the question that continues to preoccupy my thoughts on our program. As we have said, most are first-generation college students: neither they nor their parents know what a college education is or what one does with it. Many others have teachers as parents. College-educated, yes, but no real sense of the professional world beyond the classroom.

Again, as we have said, when they graduate they are faced with the choice of A) leaving family, friends, and the known world for a career or B) returning to Podunk, NY and likely abandoning the notion of a professional career—or at least severely limiting their options. Only our students from the NYC metro area are not faced with this choice. As an example, I searched hotjobs for entry level writer positions. There were 88 listed nationally. There were 2 in NY state, both in NYC.

The Code of Friendship

Though I am still in the midst of my current book project (now being reviewed by the editors), I've begun thinking about the direction of my next work. I've recently become interested in the issue of cryptography and its relationship to writing/rhetoric. In part this is b/c this topic has become a focus of recent sci-fi novels, including Stephenson's Cryptonomicon and Gibson's Pattern Recognition (both of which I'm teaching in my Cyberpunk Lit. class this summer). However, more generally speaking, it strikes me that the notion of intellectual property, information property, is hinged on the possibility of controlling access. Data encryption is likely a primary way in which access to information will be controlled and hence the marketplace value of information sustained.

network pedagogy

Collin Brooke's recent post on network pedagogy raises some interesting questions about teaching students how to participate in networked environments. He raises Adrian Miles and Jeremy Yuille's Creative Composing Manifesto, in particular the notion that we need to think about reshaping education in response to networked technologies. This recalls for me Greg Ulmer's contention in Internet Invention that the technological developments we are encountering might represent an end to schools to the extent that they are print-based institutions.

Words in Motion and Growth Tactics

I've been busy this week redesiging and launching the blog and website for Words in Motion and Growth Tactics. Words in Motion is the name of the small business my wife Rhonda and I have together. We offer a range of professional writing services from copywriting and ghostwriting to research and communications consulting. I have found it a useful experience in relation to my teaching as well; it keeps me grounded in the "real world" experience of working as a professional writer

the calculus of workload

Given the continuing shift of higher education into the marketplace logic of global capitalism, it comes as no surprise that the calculation of workload would come to obey a similar logic. After all, is it not reasonable, given the range of differences between disciplines to establish a common currency of measurement (say, number of students taught) as the means to evaluate workload.

The fact that "number of students taught" ties directly to the generation of revenue for the institution is a mere coincidence...yeah, right.

Narratology and Ludology

A recent exchange on the grandtextauto.org blog provided some interesting insight into the debate between two approaches to the study of computer games: narratology and ludology. Put briefly, narratologists focus on the narrative structures of a game, while ludologists are primarily interested in how the rules and mechanics of the game shape the user's/player's experience. I briefly commented on this conversation on that site and received a short but useful response.

However, I didn't want to continue to comment there, as the conversation has moved on to other things, and I think my perspective is too far outside the interests of that community. Put in discursive terms, they have specific uses for the concepts of narrative and ludic, that in my view are highly structural. I can see how this is useful for their work, but I believe the project of game studies will ultimately have to address the philosophical limitations of their praxis, though probably not in the terms I will lay out here.

Revising CPN

Vaughn's proposal for revising the CPN program strikes me as an excellent starting point for this conversation. I particularly like the idea of major-oriented CPN 101 (provided, of course, that we have instructors interested in teaching in these various areas). I see other thematically-oriented possibilities as well addressing various aspects of popular culture. As we mentioned in the meeting, the trick would be to get the students informed. Though if we were focusing this on 101, we could pass out information in 100. Besides, the idea of having semester-specific course descriptions for our courses is something we should strive to adapt across the English department.

the future of scholarship

My take on a topic addressed in many places. I cannot speak for the sciences, or the social sciences, but in the humanities, intellectual work is facing an incredible opportunity for growth and improvement. It is, in a sense, ironic that technology should provide this opportunity to humanities rather than other areas as humanities has been the most resistant to technolgy. Nevertheless, as I see it, blogging, and similar technologies, represent a tremendous opportunity to expand participation in the development of humanistic knowledge, to overturn the hierarchical mechanisms that restrict the production of knowledge, and usher in a new age of intellectual practice.