ENGS 345: Practicum in Teaching Writing

As promised (threatened?), here’s the link to University of Texas junior (major: history) Ryan Haecker’s op-ed column: “Who wears the pants?”

Here are two excellent responses from bloggers TBogg and Pam Spaulding. Both are witty and informative. One of them even features a visual counter-argument to Haecker! (I’m not going to tell you which one that is.)

And, if you’re curious what the rest of the UT community thought/thinks about Mr. Haeker, scroll down to the newspaper’s forum for this column.

Enjoy!

Here’s a music video for a musical about a party thrown for time-travelers, filmed entirely within the virtual world of Second Life:

Massively blog’s Moo Money has this to say:

This video is apparently based on a new musical, The Time Travelers Convention. Three students hold a convention where they put flyers in classic books, hoping that one day a time traveler will come to their party. When one actually shows up, they must face what they want to change in their lives.

Read the whole post (it’s not long), and then check out the musical. Sounds like a lot of fun!

…And here’s one more amusing time-travel video. Just because I like time travel, and Terminator parodies…:

The reading for Thursday, October 18th will be Anne Francis Wysocki’s “The Sticky Embrace of Beauty,” in Writing New Media. I’ll add this to the course calendar page shortly.

Be sure you read the sample assignments after the essay, too.

Alright! Now we get to play with some of the concepts and works that I really enjoy!

For Thursday, take a look at these:

Concept-Mapping Tools

• Bubbl.us

• Thinkature

Flash Poetry by Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries (turn on your speakers)

• Dakota

• Operation Nukorea

Digital Scholarship

• David Hoover: “The End of the Irrelevant Text: Electronic Texts, Linguistics, and Literary Theory” in Digital Humanities Quarterly 1.2 (Summer 2007)

• Michelle Comstock and Mary E. Hocks: “Voice in the Cultural Soundscape: Sonic Literacy in Composition Studies” in Computers and Composition Online (Fall 2006)

Hyperfiction

• Chris Klimas: “An Ode to Pants”

Interactive Fiction

• Zork

• The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

Finally, I’m teaching an udnergraduate course this semester on Composing Digital Narratives. There are resources on the blog for that course that may be of interest (as may the course blog itself).

Resources

• Composing Digital Narratives Reading List
• Composing Digital Narratives Resources List

As we discussed in class, here are the big announcements for Tuesday’s class (and beyond):

1. Your Greatest Fear/Worry/Problem/Anxiety about teaching English 001 is due on Tuesday. This doesn’t have to be a lengthy write-up, it only needs to be as long as it takes you to fully explain your topic.
2. For Tuesday, read Anne Francis Wysocki’s “Opening New Media to Writing: Openings and Justifications” in Writing New Media pages 1-41. Pay particular attention to the lesson plans at the end of the article, and how they either do or do not help you (and students) to understand the concepts Wysocki discusses.
3. For all future Writing Workshops, a new directive: focus on the student papers. Dan and Daniel have shown us some excellent ways we might help a class to re-engage with the source material, but for the last four workshops, I want you to take these papers at face value and help us all to see how to revise them. That doesn’t mean you can’t refer back to Warhol’s essay, but it shouldn’t be the centerpiece of your workshop.

Have a great weekend!

We’re continuing with our exploration of composition pedagogy & theory with the following readings:

• Ann E. Berthoff: “Is Teaching Still Possible? Writing, Meaning, and Higher Order Reasoning” CTiCT 387-412
• Wayne C. Booth: “The Rhetorical Stance” TC 136-144
• Peter Elbow: “Closing My Eyes as I Speak: An Argument for Ignoring Audience” TC 145-164

Also, be sure to check out the South End Art Hop Friday evening and all day Saturday. If you’re new to the Burlington area, you owe it to yourself to check it out. It’s a lot of fun. And artsy!

As I briefly mentioned at the end of class today, here’s the assignment for Tuesday:

• Photocopy and bring in one Exploration that you have commented on; make sure you remove the student’s name from the paper
• Read: Linda Flower & John R. Hayes’ “A Cognitive Process Theory of Writing” CTiCT 273-298
• Read: Patricia Bizzell’s “‘Contact Zones’ and English Studies” CTiCT 479-486
• Re-read: David Bartholomae’s “Inventing the University” CTiCT 623-654 or TC 39-67

I know you’ve read the Bartholomae for the summer workshop, so you may be able to just skim it this time. The goal is to be able to put him into conversation with Bizzell and Flower & Hayes.

Also, you should have started keeping your teaching journal by now.

Have a great long weekend, and I’ll see you all on Tuesday!