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Date:         Thu, 19 Nov 1992 21:58:28 CST
From:         Irvin Peckham <peckham@CWIS.UNOMAHA.EDU>
Subject:      Re: Getting a C
              92 12:38 am

> being incompatible to learning.  In fact, I think the discussion of grades
> is positive so long as grades aren't being given out on a curve.  I
> would like to know how I stand with regards to my peers; I would like
> to know if they're lying in a similar pothole as I am; I'd like to know
> if we're flying in formation.  Hell! I'd break the Honor Code and discuss
> grades just because the code is preventing me from *learning* more about
> how good a job I'm educating myself--but first I've got to get in Bryn Mawr
> which I think is an all-female school, which would entail a change of sex
> which I'm not at all interested in.
> >
I would suggest that some instructive comments from your teacher (and,
if your teacher is doing a good job, from your peers) might tell you
how you are doing.  Ever a believer in language, I think discourse
gives us more information than reductive symbols like grades.
Irv
--
Irvin Peckham
Internet: peckham@unomaha.edu
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Date:         Mon, 16 Nov 1992 11:52:57 CDT
From:         Don Langham <DLANGHAM@ENGLISH.AS.UA.EDU>
Subject:      Thanks, MBUers!

Thanks for the replies to my note asking about computers in foreign
language instruction.  Lisa Gerrard, Bob Taylor, Bill Condon,
Susanmarie, Jim Slatin, Doyle Burke, Bob Whipple, Jidith
Tabron, Bernie Susser, and whomever else I may be forgetting, thanks
for the info, especially the bibliographies and referrals to
knowledgable folks who were a HUGE help.

--Don Langham
  University of Alabama
  DLangham@English.as.ua.edu
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Date:         Mon, 16 Nov 1992 17:28:47 EST
From:         rselfe@MTU.EDU
Subject:      Re: software & hardware

>Dickie, when did your Lab open at Michigan Tech?

Gail,
We had a small lab--two original Macs and two DOS machines called Terak(s).
 In many ways, that bit o' a computing lab drove later decisions about our
larger versions (1985, I believe): with so few machines, they were
naturally "clustered."  We kept that aspect of the arrangement.  We still
have both platforms.

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Dickie Selfe              rselfe@mtu.edu
Humanities Dept.          906-487-3225
Michigan Technological U.
Houghton, MI   49931
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Date:         Fri, 20 Nov 1992 08:47:02 EST
From:         mer <MROSE01@UKCC.UKY.EDU>
Subject:      RE: Re:Multimedia/In Defense of

Hi John!

              Complicity Theory.
Thrasymachus of Calcedon is the source for the "theory of the opposite party."
              The problem with my "given" is that it may indeed be
              private and not public, but I see this notion in:
Georges Bataille:  Transgression theory: transgressors are dependent upon the
                   structures being transgressed.
Baudrillard:  complicity theory through the concept of seduction.
Valesio: "the enemy of rhetoric is not logic but ideology."
Laclau and Mouffe:  the concept of articulation.

This gets translated by my friend Mark McPhail into a critique, for example
of anti-sexist and anti-racist critical discourses, that by participating in
an elitist realm in order to situate themselves *against* racism and sexism,
merely reinforce the very structures perpetuating those inequalities.
As in academic discourses of all sorts.

My work is playing out the complicitously agonistic relationship of avant-garde
discourses (art and social philosophy) with dominant discursive formations.
I argue that this complicity becomes visible if one examines how avant-garde
artists and social philosophers use physics tropes to situate themselves
polemically.


                           A start in any case.  Hope this helps.....mer
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Date:         Mon, 23 Nov 1992 17:12:13 EST
From:         mer <MROSE01@UKCC.UKY.EDU>
Subject:      Re: His Master's House
              23 Nov 1992 16:18:58 -0500 from <R_CONNORS@UNHH.UNH.EDU>

Bob:

              Hah!  Just what I was thinking of, that damned dog by
              the Victrola.

              And good response by the way.


                                                         mer
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Date:         Wed, 18 Nov 1992 22:10:35 -0800
From:         allen@SONOMA.EDU
Subject: Re: what makes a good exercise?

Exercise for what purpose?  In general when I design an exercise I try to select
out a cruciaal prt of a more complex process.  I set up a controlled situation
so that students can praactice that small piece, thus enabling them to do the
larger process more successfully on their own.  I also try to plan the exercise
so that it is reltively short--that way it cn be talked bout before and fter/
I also try to have it somewhat openended, so that students don't assume tht
there is ONE right way to ccomplish the taask.

    This is very general, though--knowing what sort of exercises you had in
mind would help focus a response.

     (Plese excuse unreliable "" "a" key.)

Julie
aallen@sonoma.edu
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Date:         Fri, 20 Nov 1992 08:24:27 EST
From:         mer <MROSE01@UKCC.UKY.EDU>
Subject:      RE: Re:Multimedia/In Defense of Reason
              19 Nov 1992 17:29:22 CST from <peckham@CWIS.UNOMAHA.EDU>

Irv:

               We are of course both partially right in this matter of the
               monological or dialogical nature of argumentative discourse.
               Yes, all forms of discourse are inherently dialogical, even
               poetry, but from the perspective of politics, some forms of
               speech tend to suppress others because of their status in the
               culture.

               The monological tendency must always fight against the always-
               already presence of the dialogic (remember the centrifugal and
               centripetal tropes--misleading as they are emerge here) because
               of the inherently unstable, heteroglossic nature of all speech
               acts.

               Another way to think about this is to see how Bakhtin offers a
               way to distinguish between the notion of hegemony in Gramsci,
               involving coercisive and ideological state apparatuses,
               and the notion of discursive formation in Foucault, in which
               power can not necessarily be located, but the overall effect of
               the discursive web is to make some things visible, some utter-
               ances possible, and others invisible and unheard.  With,
               Bakhtin closer to F than G.

               You are right; discourse is inherently unstable and polyphonic.
               Yes I'm partially right; this is true only in an idealized sense
               yet if we take the political realm into account, the monological
               and dialogical take on new significances, which is one of Mikhai
               Bakhtin's great contributions to the discussion.

               I taught Moffett in a comp theory course this semester, and
               I was *very* suprised at how well these students (training to
               become high school english teachers) took to his book.  I'd a
               thunk it would be too much work for them.
               The narrative chapter was their fav by the way.

                                                  best....mer
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Date:         Mon, 16 Nov 1992 08:15:17 CDT
From:         Jim Raymond <JRAYMOND@ENGLISH.AS.UA.EDU>
Subject:      Getting a C

David Schwalm,
    Just to second your observations about different kinds of
teaching/learning objectives.  One of my best learning experiences
was aboard a 40-ft. sailboat, where I spent a week with my twelve-year
mbu
old daughter, a super sailing instructor, and one other student.
The
guy was a great teacher.  We each learned what we were capable of
learning.  We each left with a sense of our accomplishments and with
a sense of how much there was left to learn.  No grades.  I can't
imagine that grades would have done anything but sour the experience.
    Same thing when I teach legal writing to judges.  I spend a week
with five or six of them.  They each have a unique learning curve.
Some make incredible progress in a short time; others--well, maybe
they'll catch on later.  No grades, though.  I can't imagine that
grades would serve any useful purpose.
    Wish we could find away around them in regular courses.

--Jim Raymond
  Director of Freshman Composition
  English Department
  University of Alabama
  (205) 348-6488
  JRaymond@English.as.ua.edu
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Date:         Tue, 17 Nov 1992 20:35:47 CST
From:         Irvin Peckham <peckham@CWIS.UNOMAHA.EDU>
Subject:      Re: Getting a C
              92 5:53 pm

> What is more interesting is that people are calling for more ways to
> "credentialize" education, i.e. find MECHANICAL WAYS of assessing the
> amorphous "standards" so as to put some (another dreaded wor
> "accountability" into the education system.
> 	Rubbish!
> 	Want a good education?  Look at the number of required courses.
> Some "places" have some many required courses that students don't need
> to decide more than a handful of times what courses to take in their
> undergraduate lifetime.
> 	It's a case of the more paded theschool is the lousier it may
> be.  I really am taken up with Brown University's 30 course requirement
> for graduation.  It's so "arrogant," something like saying that their
> graduates learn so much in their courses that 30 courses would be enough
> versus, maybe, 40-45 for some monstrous public instituition.
>
To whoever wrote the above:
The schools we've been looking at generally do not have requirements.
Advisors and students work out a direction together in ongoing
conferences.  the important pt. is students are encouraged to
take command of their own lives (characteristic of professional
and managerial class training according to Bernstein), make their
own choices, learn how to operate in ambiguity.  No supprise they
are more capable in professions that demand self-governance.

--
Irvin Peckham
Internet: peckham@unomaha.edu
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Date:         Fri, 20 Nov 1992 18:21:00 PST
From:         Lisa Gerrard <IDR2LXG@UCLAMVS.BITNET>
Subject:      More WY Resolution

Oops, forgot to post the title of the article on the Wyoming Resolution:

"The Wyoming Conference Resolution Opposing Unfair Salaries and Working
Conditions for Post-Secondary Teachers of Writing." It's on pp. 274-280,
College English 49 (March 1987).

Lisa Gerrard
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Date:         Mon, 16 Nov 1992 20:46:15 CST
From:         Irvin Peckham <peckham@CWIS.UNOMAHA.EDU>
Subject:      Re: (Fwd: *C&CD*) Text is inside, Images outside? (28)

>
> How is it that images are outside ther mind while text is inside?  Does this
> imply that we can't think imagistically? What do we do with color? Are
> colors internal or external?
>
> I think it's all in our heads--the buzzing stream. We're just lucky we can
> sort of agree on some of the properties of the supposed phenomena that lead
> to our impressions.
>
> Hey mer!!! What do you think as one of our resident thinkers of things
> musically philosophical?
>
>  -- Robert Royar (RobertRoyar@Delphi.com) New York Institute of Technology
>     "The guerrilla lives among the people like the fish in the sea."
>                                                               - Mao Zedong
>
> ------------------------------
>
Robert:
I'm afraid I was just publicly musing when I should have been doing
other things.  Still, it seems to me that images are _pictures_ that
in some way are constructed by our memories of what we have _seen_.
We "see" what is on the outside.  Text is _not_ the outside.  It
represents what we think on the inside.  I realize that text has
presence--but only as it represents thought.  Images seem to go
the other way.  They are first external and then become, when
internalized, representations of the external.  As they become
distorted and rearranged, they more and more closely represent
our thought patterns, i.e., they get internalized, but there seems
to be an important difference in how we think in images (internalizations
of what we have seen on the outside) and in language, which is not
what we have seen but what we have _thought_ about what we have
seen.

--
Irvin Peckham
Internet: peckham@unomaha.edu
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Date:         Wed, 18 Nov 1992 10:54:11 CST
From:         Irvin Peckham <peckham@CWIS.UNOMAHA.EDU>
Subject:      RE: Re:Multimedia/In Defense of Reason

>
> John B:
>
>               It's precisely Foucault's inversion of the Clausewitz thesis,
>               that politics is war waged by other means, that indicates how
>               argumentative discourses,actually any form of monological
>               speech, should be understood as articulations of hegemony:
>               articulated forms of domination.
>
>                                                                mer
>
I'm a little surprised that anyone should have ever thought that any
argument (that is anyone since Mead wrote in Mind ... in the 30's)
should have imagined that any discourse, much less argument is
"monological."

--
Irvin Peckham
Internet: peckham@unomaha.edu
From: LHAMPLYONS@CUDNVR.DENVER.COLORADO.EDU
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Subject: Re: bibliographic plea
Date: 17 Nov 92 05:13:13 GMT
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Michael Gos--I am having lal sorts of trouble linking "Nate" paper, literacies,
   and ESL. Want to tell us what your focus/topic is?
Liz
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Date:         Thu, 19 Nov 1992 10:21:00 EST
From:         Alan Girelli <GIRELLI@BRANDEIS.BITNET>
Subject:      RE: Responses to posts

>Angela, let me second Jim McDonald's recent posting.  Of course it is
>sometimes disappointing to post something and have no one (seemingly)
>respond to it, but we can't really measure silence on the net in any but
>negative terms.  I've been thinking about ways to re-imagine silence
>both here and in my class' on-line discussions in light of the recent
>thread of lurking (which is one of the things that has kept in
>oops, that should be it, afloat in my mind, David).  I'd like to think
>that in many ways silence makes room for words, or at least shapes the
>space for words.  ....

>Susanmarie Harrington
>University of Michigan
>ENglish COmposition Board
>smh@aal.itd.umich.edu

When I was a member of very non-exclusive college choir group, we had a
director who once shouted us into submission, glared at the Bass section (me
among them) and said:

"Gentlemen, stop riding out a half note into a whole note.  Music is the
organization of sound AND SILENCE.  (Long, pregnant, silent pause).  AND
(shorter pause, just a pregnant).  AND.  (One more pause).  And, the silence is
just as important as the sound.  (Pause.)  Is my meaning clear?"

His meaning was clear.  Still is.

I wish I could remember the choir directors name for those MBU's hailing from
the University of Connecticut, Storrs chapter, Arjona by the lake.  But I do
remember what the man said about silence.

ALAN GIRELLI
Brandeis University
Bitnet: girelli@brandeis
Internet: girelli@binah.cc.brandeis.edu
AppleLink: U0181
Phone:  (617) 736-4592
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Date:         Mon, 16 Nov 1992 21:03:23 CST
From:         Irvin Peckham <peckham@CWIS.UNOMAHA.EDU>
Subject:      Re: Getting a C

A bit to Jim and David on their comments on grades--David's
remarks about the frequent quizzes and pedagogical philsophy predicated
on "credentialing"; and Jim's observation on how grades would
have hindered some positive learning experiences he described.
I would ask David (who is, I know, already attracted to the
student-centered model) to become more attracted to it.  One
can do quite a bit to minimize the presence of grades in the
course and maximize the goal of learning.  Elbow has written
quite a bit about this, particularly with reference to writing
and how the teacher responds to texts.  Elbow of course doesn't
grade texts.  Neither does Richard Larson.  There are a few others
in this camp (including yours truly here); the upshot of which
is that we manage to grades out of the way a bit.  As David
has pointed out, however, such a philosophy demands an overturning
of the credentialing assumption to be replaced by a educating
assumption.
  We have recently been looking at schools for my daughter who
will soon graduate from high school.  I have been struck by the
way in which the wealthy liberal arts schools are generally
predicated on the educating assumption.  Few of them stress grades.
They stress learning, the individual student.  I teach in a
university with basically working class students who could never
afford the kind of school we'll be sending Heather to.  My
university is predicated on the credentialing assumption.  I think
we all know which assumption leads to the better education.
Interesting implications here.
--
Irvin Peckham
Internet: peckham@unomaha.edu
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Date:         Mon, 16 Nov 1992 12:34:36 -0500
From:         Nick.Carbone@WRITING.UMASS.EDU
Subject:      Reply to Re: Multimedia

Students faith in text over images might have more to do with their com-
parative lack of naivete with text.  Most of the students I get grew up
with more images than texts making claims on their sense of reality.  It starts
as early as Saturday morning television when those ads for toys come on.  The
toys look much cooler and more real than they are when you get them out of
the box..  The let down...meanwhile, in school, the same kids are reading
text books that present their data as facts, which they're usually asked to
memorize and repeat on a test for comprehension.  They learn to read
passively, accepting writing as true, and experience teaches them that
images can be used to distort.
     Most kids don't grow learning how to interpret art.  But they do come
to understand advertising--to a degree.  The idea that words are somehow
wedded to facts and that facts are truth is hard to shake.   When I teach
intro to lit courses I always begin by reminding my students that the
kind of reading they'll be asked to do is different, it needs to be active..
They can't read a poem the way the read a newspaper or watch t.v..  Then
later in the course we return to that argument and say, you should read
a newspaper and watch t.v. using some of the methods used when trying to
make some sense of the poems you've read--writing in margins, looking
for implications, querying authority, paying attention to your own
thoughts and not dismissing them in the search for the right answer,
the fact of the piece.

nickc@titan.ucc.umass.edu
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Posted-Date: Thu, 19 Nov 92 19:17:12 -0200
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Date:         Thu, 19 Nov 1992 19:17:12 -0200
From:         "(Leland Emerson McCleary)" <mccleary@CAT.CCE.USP.BR>
Subject:      Re: lurker, etc.

Nancy Allem says she hasn't heard a lurker label yet that
satisfies, and I agree they tend to carry all sorts of negative
connotations, which says a lot about this society's valuation of
silence.  But don't we have the expression "So-and-so is a good ear"?
Or does that term only refer to the confident in a one-to-one, and not
to an appreciative audience of, say, two story-tellers spinning yarns
back and forth?

Leland McCleary / U Sao Paulo
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Date:         Sun, 15 Nov 1992 17:10:00 CDT
From:         Mary OSullivan <MFOSULLI@MACC.WISC.EDU>
Subject:      computer-supported classroom management

I teach at a Wisconsin technical college that enrolls about 4,000 FTE students.
Over the past few years, due to a supportive dean and some creative department
budget management, we now have a computer-supported writing classroom with 24
student and one teacher station, with an LCD projector and screen attached to
the teacher station.  All machines are on the school's Novelle network.  We run
Daedalus (purchasing that was a real coup) and are hoping to add Writer's Helper
next year.

Here's my question for MBU participants.  At this point, I am trying to
coordinate the c-s classroom on top of my regular teaching duties (and while
working on my Ph.D.). I am feeling a tad stretched...My dean has promised to go
to the president of the college to seek release time for me to spend more time
on the c-s classroom and experimenting with the Daedalus environment, but he
needs some data to support his plea.  I am looking for information about how
other colleges run computer-supported writing classrooms to provide part of that
data.  Sepcifically, I would like to know:
1. are your college's computer-supported writing classrooms coordinated or
managed by a faculty person
2. how is technical support handled and who is responsible for it (faculty or
computer tech people)
3. what duties does the faculty person manageingthe c-s classroom on your campus
have
4. how many hours of a faculty person's overall load does manageing the c-s
classroom account for
5. anything else you might think would be useful to me as I try to convince
administration and technical people that a writing classroom really needs to
be coordinated by a writing teacher

Sorry for the length of the message--working on a dissertation makes one
incapable of saying anything succinctly.

Mary O'Sullivan
mfosulli@macc.wisc.edu
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