Back in the Classroom, Again

I have been reassured and delighted to discover that my joy in the classroom still exists. After only one (very soul-destroying) term of teaching over two years of study and other projects, I am back in the classroom again. What I am enjoying so much is feeling like I belong, and can connect with my students. I hadn't realized how much I'd been afraid that I had lost my classroom "presence." It feels like home; I feel alive in my art. I love to teach, to really get my students grasping the content and skill I am teaching. It's a joy to activate their understandings and performances.

I suppose this is the honeymoon phase of my return. I only have limited marking so far, and the students aren't stressed yet with some possibly acting out. We'll see what the future brings, but right now, I am satisfied!

Very Bad, Very Bad

Today was my first day back at school as a teacher since last December, and it was very messy. But I must have some positive feelings about being back because when I played around in Illustrator and created this image, I liked it even though it seemed kind of not-negative.

I cancelled my first class, because my laptop wouldn't start, (for the second time since Window xp has been installed.) The students didn't have access to their computer lab accounts without their user names and passwords, and the new registration software isn't working very well, and they hadn't received the letters telling them what they are. I could have looked up their information one by one, but my laptop wouldn't start - have I mentioned that?

The printer doesn't have the new software installed so xp won't print to it, and I like to print out things like class lists and topical outlines. Even after I got a new hard drive and re-installed all my info, I couldn't print. No matter, I couldn't get at my class lists because the new software, changed my name (I use my second; it used my first) and so wouldn't let me read my data.

Then I went to another campus for another course, but the program is moving and was neither at their old spot, nor their new one in a quite unfinished building. It took me an hour to find that out!

I did not have a good day.

My Thinking Tool

I'm more dependant than I'd thought. I start teaching on Tuesday, and so I have to prepare. I am using WebCT for 5 of my courses, even though I'm only required to for 2. The other 3 I have chosen to use WebCT as a Learning Management System (LMS) because I like the orderly way it contains all my course materials and makes information available to my students. I felt in control.

The school WebCT technician has been doing the changeover from the summer courses and upgrading our version, and for serious personal reasons had to be away unexpectedly while WebCT was unavailable. So I had other work to do, right? Yes but I couldn't think! Yesterday my courses were available, and I worked intensively all day, accomplished a lot, and felt in tune and coherent. I love feeling that way. I love looking at my course sites and tweaking them. I love creating them. It makes me feel creative and powerful! (Go figure! Some people just have weird needs ;-> or that's what I used to think.)

During the evening as I continued enjoying this energy surge, I made a few connections. While I was blocked from setting up my coursees in WebCT, I couldn't think and plan. Separate files to work on weren't enough. I couldn't think about classes, I couldn't plan my classes without my thinking tool for teaching - my computer and WebCT. And the other course I have at another institution, there's no WebCT there. So what have I started doing, even though I'm pressed for time? I'm creating a web site, of course, to support the class, and my thinking!

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originally uploaded by Semiotic Explorer.

So this is how I imagine myself as a cyber-explorer, learning .... or fiddling around ;->

I hate summer colds!

I hate summer colds! I can't think through my thick sinuses and scratchy throat. I've sent out messages requesting what I need to know to plan my fall courses, and had no replies. Just as well, because I can't think anyhow, and I have no energy.

All too soon, I will be very busy. Ah! A teacher's life ;->

Images, RSS feeds, & News Readers

Well yesterday I either worked very hard or did nothing at all; I can't decide which.

When I saw the picture icon on the Blogger Posting window, I just had to try it out. The least complex method seemed to be to use Google, find a suitable image, and use the code offered and the url of the image. It worked. As web stuff gets more user friendly, I move towards it by learning a few more "technical" moves. Picture a woman running, arms outstretched, towards an open laptop rushing through the air towards her. They embrace.

Spurred on by this success, I looked up definitions for RSS, worked on setting up the RSS feed for this, my blog. To find out if I had been successful, I clicked on the icon, took the link, and created a new channel in my Mac News Aggregator. It worked!!!! So now I'm going to start collecting educational blog channels. ZOWIE! I'm not sure what I'm doing but I'm doing it.

Phil's Film Workshop 10th Anniversary - Camping Resolutions!

I resolve never again to -

• use a tent with the floor space of 2 air mattresses
  
• sleep in a tent I can't stand up in
  
• stay in a tent more than 2 fields away from the porta-potty
  
• sleep on air mattresses over 20 years old and unchecked for air leaks

However, the people were a pleasure, the food was great, the films were interesting, and seeing dawn and hearing a distant farmer call out "co-boss, co-boss, co-boss" to his cows reminding me of my grandparents farm - priceless!

Print: From Tyranny to Democracy

From Walter Ong's writings, I learned the term"chirographic" - that's handwriting, - and its impact is different from print's. Writing raises consciousness, Ong says, and I believe that's true both culturally and individually.

I remember friends who were studying for their PH.D.s in Education saying that getting their degrees had a profound impact on them, that it changed them deeply. I nodded, of course, and thought maybe they were exagerating. Now, I'm beginning to understand what they said. Part of it is simply the reaction from people around who honour and value this achievement, but reading Walter Ong has convinced me that it is also the impact of the prolonged meditation that writing a thesis is. People are changed, - I am feeling the change of attitudes towards me, and a complex of awareness that my writing has created within me.

The most important seed of my writing was my learning to write using a computer and word processing software. My handwriting blocked my writing because I regarded it as visually inadequate, signalling low status thinking and it was physically difficult too. Also, my years of intense reading and the academic culture had caused me to think that the only "real" writing was that which was printed. Books were "real writing" and handwritten notes were just rough notes, no matter how much I had tried to do a good job of writing.

Because of the material structure of publishing, few people got to be published. It was expensive and complex to do and so there were many gate-keepers. Thus, the tyranny of print, more visible now as the stranglehold of published is being loosened and lessened. Word processing, desktop publishing, web sites, and blogs are creating a new democracy of print, where individuals with access to comparatively inexpensive equipment and communication links can present their ideas, thought, words, to a much broader audience with few, if any, gatekeepers.

This is creating a new understanding of communication using print. Using keyboarding and software knowledge (and online computers) is different from using chirograhpically produced text and the publishing industry. We are learning this new thinking/communication tool, and beginning to understand that it affects us profoundly.

Walter Ong - My Hero!

I'm reading Walter Ong's Orality and Literacy and it feels like writing my thesis was preparation for reading his work. This was published in 1982, but it is even more relevant today, IMHO.

I read Patricia Sullivan's article Practicing Safe Visual Rhetoric on the WWW (available at http://austen.sla.purdue.edu/handa.html) and found an interesting reference to Ong. I think Olson's The World on Paper also references Ong. In any case, I bought Orality and Literacy and I am captivated, wowed, hooked.

More later.

More Authors than Audience?

Are the young blog writers spending more time creating/composing their work, both text and visual, than they are in reading the work of others? In the environment we now live within, it's entirely possible that overall more time is spent authoring than audiencing. This is a kind of reversal to what has happened in sound.

I remember my parents, when I was a child, singing in the basement below my bedroom. My Mom played the piano and Dad plus their two closest friends, my "aunt" and "uncle" sang hymns in harmony. All of them were in the choir except my Dad. They didn't listen to records or radio all that much. They were more performers than audience.

So, too, in the Sixties, I had some musician friends who liked to "jam" anytime they could find someone else to sing or play with them. They, however, were more audience than performers because they also spent hours listening to records and other musicians.

Since Gutenberg, despite private letters and business documents with small and private readership, the "publishing" of written work has been highly circumscribed with both economics and elite judges limiting which work could move into the public spere (like music recordings now.) Now with the ease of access to the web, people can "publish" their writing with little to no interference. Blogs are only one way of published. Theses and novels and commentary are all to be found on the web. The personal writer rules.

In music something quite different is happening. Relatively little personal music making is to be found on the web, especially as compared to the huge trade in copies of professionally made popular music. It is almost the opposite of books. There are books up on the web, but in very small proportion compared to blogs and personal journals.

On the web, with the written word, there are more authors than audiences; with music there are more audiences than performers. Why? And how is Karaoke different? Is it audience, performer, or hybrid?

Restricting the Semiotic Palette

I've been thinking about what would have to happen for me to produce an article for a scholarly journal. I can't just take an excerpt of my thesis and send it along because journals restrict the semiotic palette. I'm limited to the font of their choice, and only one font. There are no pictures or colours. That means everything has to be done through words, and only words.

It's possible; I've done it before. And I suspect that money is part of the issue, although I also suspect that the innate conservatism of scholary journals dictates that no effort is made to innovate semiotically.

I feel caught between how I want to and can communicate information and concepts and knowing that I must work in an limited medium. I used to think that scholarship was all about exploring the the novel, about seeing possibilities and connections. I know there are some pockets where this happens, but it's like I have to wear a girdle and gloves and a navy-blue uniform instead of the comfortable but professional clothes that allow me to focus on my work without energy draining into a useless, limiting formality.

Watching TV Ads

I see a lot of car ads during the news and the 10:00 dramas I tend to watch, and I'm noticing the way text is integrated as part of the visual. In one, the text moves from the back of the centre to occupying centre screen, and the text itself is slightly off kilter. It's almost at an angle showing perspective, and not quite. The end result is, the irregularity draws the eye.

In another, the words drop in and move, centre screen, part of the movement that holds the viewer's eye. This is text as a visual "character," as a visual element more than as words carrying information. This is the new multisemiotic of our age.

Spring Colds

Spring colds are the pits. Sinuses blocked equals a sluggish mind. Runny eyes and nose are uncomfortable and unattractive; (my mate got it first and gave it to me!)

Others - Learning to Write

So I was talking to a friend yesterday and mentioned my thesis being about how to write, and referred to how I learned to write - joined printing and having to get "good enough" to get a straight pen and ink, and what a struggle that was. She related and began talking about how discouraging her messy-looking handwriting was when she was struggling to learn. Then, without a word from me, she said "What did they expect? All the written work we saw was in books and looked neat and finished." Exactly. My point. As children learning to write, we were immediately diminished and discouraged by our inability to achieve what we thought was the standard, something that looked like the books we were asked to read.

I was not the only one feeling this way! In fact, my wanting to have my writing look like a book may have been the norm!Think about it, when you are taught to cook, you are supervised, do it slowly and simply, but end up with food, something edible. The same thing when you learn to knit or sew, or build or repair. What you end up doing as you learn is create something that, while perhaps not up to a high standard, is never-the-less recognizable as close to a product in daily use.

My friend and I shifted into talking about our late-teen, early-twenties daughters, both of whom have their own blogs and spend hours online. The text they practice and the text they see have a unity and connection that ours never did. They read books too, but I suspect they don't hold them in the reverence that we did/do. They use and see text as part of a communicative system that they are tightly tied into, and that gives them a real discourse community, a far better learning situation than the required writing that always seemed inadequate both because of its appearance (not a book) and because it was observed as a performance where style and correctness mattered more than meaning.

I wonder how the increased amounts of time in casual "texting" will affect how they write in more formal situations?

Reading Has Always Been Postmodern

Historically, as soon as many people were reading the same text, exactly the same text as replicated mechanically, they began to disagree on what that text meant. (And perhaps even before, the source of so-called heresies lay in disagreements about what texts "meant.") But with increasing numbers of people reading the same texts, their different "readings" became obvious. And it's easy to understand why. Text, as the postmoderns have vigorously pointed out, is not absolute. The words stay the same but the reader(s) change.

If you read a story, you read it from your point-of-view and that affects how you "understand" it. If you read a newspaper, your point-of-view on what has happened is shaped by who you are and what you have experienced. The same person at different ages "sees" the meaning differently. Age, gender, race, class, nationality, profession, - all these shape how textual (and visual) stories are "taken."

Both the law and science have implicitly known this since their inceptions. Language is slippery; that's the basis of rhetoric. The law tries to be absolutely clear, and lawyers and judges make their livings interpreting it. The rigidities and formulas of scientific writing are simply attempts to avoid multiple interpretations.

I remember teaching my classes that a business letter that had more than one possible interpretation was poorly written, and that a poem or story that had only one interpretation possible was poorly written. Different writing for different purposes, and in certain situations being open to interpretation is a strength not a weakness.

So readers have always and will always interpret text, and thus have always and will always have different readings. It's inevitable. The questions the postmoderns ask us to reflect on, as I understand them, are "Do I understand myself to be an interpreter and not the sole correct authority?" and "How do we decide who, and on what basis, can be an authority whose interpretation can be trusted/allowed/accepted?"

In this age of doubt, litigation, individualism, those are confounding questions.

Representation and Replication

Sometime in the 1600s, the printing press was invented by Gutenberg, and mass replication of text became possible. Suddenly humanity was on a new path. Previously hand-copied books were of necessity rare, and those who could read were also rare. Caxton moved the printed page from posters into books, and reading objects became more complex. In western culture, the Bible and a few other books had been preserved and studied, but that kind of studying was, in many ways, more like meditation, like lectio divina, rather than what we would call reading today.

The association of reading with the Bible and the development of Protestantism led to a immense campaign for universal literacy - everyone should be able to read so they could read the Bible. At the same time, science was developing, as the spread of reading and books led to the spread of knowledge and/or ideas about what constituted knowledge. Reading became increasingly prevalent and important because of the exact and widespread replication of textual objects, that is, books.

This incremental growth in reading and readers had an interesting impact on readers. They disagreed with each other about what the text "meant." And therein lies my next snippit.

I'm an Owner!

Long time, no whatever, write and read, I guess. I been existing (and I do mean "existing") without a computer of my own. Used my husband's till he got home from his trip. Then used the old IBM clunker in his study, and the open access one in the part-time teacher's lounge. Looking up my mail in two different webmails was awkward and inefficient, so I didn't look as often. Writing without access to all my files was a pain. Printing up my thesis on Jim's computer kept him from using it to edit, so I felt pressured and guilty. All-in-all, I felt limited and even lonely without my computer prosthesis.

Now I have my very own iBook G4, and it's almost fully set up to my desire. I still have a couple of things to sort out, but I can write emails, and get emails without fussing with webmails. I can write up documents. I have PowerPoint problems, but I'm sure I can get that worked out. I like the keyboard, and I love the interface. At the moment, I am a happy camper, especially because I can now get back to writing here!

Needing Help!!!

So I decided to ignore my other responsibilities and focus on editing my thesis so I could get it done before I have to return this computer. I was working my way diligently through my edits when I noticed that a page reference was missing. I knew what the page was from my edited copy to I just added it in. Then I noticed another page reference was missing so I tried to get into "Edit Citations" to see if I had added it, but, although there was a space before the period, the computer said there wasn't a citation there to edit. When I clicked on a citation that included the author's name and the publishing date, but not the page, there, in the editing field, was the page reference.

I checked several others. Consistently the page references weren't showing in the document but had been added in the editing field. What-to-do? What-to-do? After much exploring and manual reading, it seemed to me that it must be something to do with Output Styles. So repeatedly I tried to open APA 5. The little icon that signals that something is opening appears then a quick flash of a field which immediately disappears. So I can't change anything to get the pages to show. Which means I have a problem because I have to have the pages references there when I print up the next version for my final committee meeting.

I use Google to get to EndNote, find "Technical Support" and describe the problem. The page says that they guarantee a response within 3 working days. That should be just about when I have to turn this computer back to its owner.

I'm tired of fighting with software!!!!!

Working at Work Avoidance

The first time I heard about EndNote I was fascinated. A software that does all the finicky detail work of citing and building a bibliography! I was immediately sold. As soon as I was back at school, despite the cost, I picked up a student version. Anything to free myself from bibliographic hell.

For a long time I was enthralled by filling out the reference cards, citing while I wrote, and then checking my References which kept magically growing. And EndNote took care of the nasty APA details. I did have a few problems. I'm a tad manual-adverse and figuring out some of the steps I had to take took some time. By-and-large, though, I was happy with the way EndNote worked.

Then the first of my computer migrations happened, and I had to migrate across platforms. To keep using EndNote I had to purchase a Mac upgrade for my Windows version. What a messy experience! I emailed and ordered it from a pleasant memail help-person. First he sent me a Windows upgrade, then a Mac 5 for OS 9, and finally, finally EndNote 6 for OS X. Lots of emailing there and the guy was apologetic about the confusion and I got to keep the various CDs and manuals.

I'm a bit detail adverse too, and I avoided learning about APA, figuring the software would take care of all that for me. Luckily my thesis supervisor is kind and supportive. As he told me things like, no author's name here, and page number there, I worked with the manual enough to figure it out a little bit here and a little bit there. Worked for me.

It took me a while to figure out how important the library is, and that an alias is not a library. I did lose one version of my thesis library, but a backup existed and I was able to get it and add in the references I'd lost. It wasn't too bad, except for the anxiety attach I had until I got the backup installed. So, ... I learned a lot.

Then I had to move to another Mac, an iBook, and now I'm back to a second G4. The good news is my institution issues me computers; the bad news is there's a lot of change. As a result, the good news is, I am forced to learn a lot. Now I am squatting temporarily on my mate's G4 while he's travelling. While I was trying to edit my thesis, EndNote would either not open, or "unexpectedly quit" over and over and over. I tried all kinds of variations; nothing worked. But all the elements showed up in Word undertools and in the icon bar. They just wouldn't open.

I began feeling a bit anxious. I pulled out the manual. Didn't find it helpful. I uninstalled and reinstalled the program. Still kept quitting. Went to the EndNote site, and found the FAQ. After stumbling through the list of questions for a while, I found one that seemed to fit. It told me to get a free download to update EndNote 6 for OS X. I did, and in one of the most common of the current cliches, the rest is history. More or less.

On the computer previous to this one, the iBook, EndNote developed the twitch of whenever I put in a citation, the rainbow ball would spin and spin, then suddenly the last page of the references would be on the screen. I scroll back up to the page I was on and edit the citation, whereupon the same thing would happen. The bad news is this happens for every single citation. The good news is I'm mostly finished and don't have to add too many more citations. And the other good news is that I've learned how to use the scroll bar to find the heading and page number with it. Learning by accident.

So, is that work avoidance, or simply a different kind of work? Don't know, don't care, would rather play with the computer than work out where commas go and where periods go and type it all up manually.

I can cite while I write again and I know more about how to use EndNote. I'm sure I must be avoiding some work.

The Digital Disconnect

One of the things I've learned through putting up a few sites is that it is actually quick and easy to fix or update a single page, and then upload it to its site. You don't have to take months. I've also noticed that it's more interesting to create a new site than update an old one. Which may be why there's a lot of out-of-date stuff up there on the web. So what?

So an institution should figure out how to keep its web site up-to-date, especially when it comes to a page referring to someone who has died. I don't know why it has to be a secret who is in charge of getting the web changed when something has changed. The presisdent of the institution must have better things to do with his time than redirecting concerns about seriously out-of-date material to the one in charge of the technitions who will actually make the changes. Why don't institutional web sites encourage their employees to help them by having, in a prominent spot, an address where problems could be directed?

Why not use the interest of people in their part of the institution by encouraging their participation rather than discouraging them! I suspect that many people including managers have no idea how simple small changes are. It's part of the great digital disconnect where people who don't understand make decisions, or don't make decisions because they don't know how things work!