Fall is a’comin’ August 16, 2007
Posted by kmiddleton in whining.add a comment
The fall semester quickly, all too quickly, approaches. In the best possible scenario, it engenders celebratory feelings. Yay fall! All of the excitement and anticipation of a new school year: new classes, new students, new projects. Hooray!
Normally, that kind of spirit would beckon us to get down, to party! Heck, even “tear the roof off this place,” as the common parlance states. The folks at Buildings and Grounds must have gotten the same idea. They are apparently familiar with a different architectural metaphor, however. At good old 423 Western, my office building, they’ve left the roof untouched and torn the stairs off the place. As such, it’s about a four foot leap to get onto the porch and into the building. Since I finished up my high school phys. ed. requirement via correspondence, it’s safe to say that I’m working from home for the time being.
But I am glad to see that everyone on campus is eagerly anticipating the new semester!
Celebrate Independence! July 4, 2007
Posted by kmiddleton in pop culture, whining.1 comment so far
Sure, some people barbeque and remember our illustrious (?!) national history. For me, there’s no better way to commemorate America’s independence from Britain than to watch the Eddie Izzard marathon on BBC America (1-6 p.m. today). Post Brit transvestites riffing on world history? Hi-larious! Better than sparklers and hot dogs any day. [As we speak, he's riffing on the Trojan War. His take on the most fearsome warrior in Greek mythology? "You mean my name is Achilles and I have an Achilles heel? I'll be laughingstock!]
Sadly, I promised J. that I’d send her a working draft of my part of our Coetzee project today. Sigh. No EI for me.
Enjoy the holiday, y’all.
Summer=Time for a New Mantra June 17, 2007
Posted by kmiddleton in whining.3 comments
Someone around here, and we’re not going to mention any names, has been a lazy, lousy blogger. Three guesses about who.
Normally, this is the kind of thing that would send me (who, me?) into paroxysms of guilt, which would spiral out into self-flagellation for all of the various other things that I’ve left unattended or have been tardy about finishing. These things are legion, and my list can stretch as far back as my junior year of college (if you had any doubts about my prodigious memory).
However. Given that I’ve just finished two semesters, an intensive summer session with a new class, and a rewarding-but-brain-busting two weeks at DMAC, I think it’s time to cut myself a little slack. Given that I’m trying to finish up some administrative tasks for American Studies, prepare for a new year of ProVisions, the series of pedagogy sessions, move my office, and am currently covered in hives, it’s definitely time to re-think the way that I work.
Thus, for this summer, I’m going to try something new on for size. Instead of my usual “if you don’t do this you’re an evil person who deserves to go straight to one of Dante’s choice levels of hell,” I’m going to experiment with “be kind to yourself.” I’m not making any claims toward originality here, I’m just saying, it’s time to try something different. Let’s see if I can use compassion, rather than punishment, as a motivating force.
Updates to come. Stay tuned.
Architect of Exhaustion; or Back in the Saddle May 14, 2007
Posted by kmiddleton in new media, pedagogy, research, whining.1 comment so far
My, my, my. Long time, no blog, eh?
Once the MIT5 conference ended, I was hurtling through the final two weeks of classes, with all of the teaching, grading, and coaching through assignments that that time period entails. I just submitted grades on Thursday evening, and so had all of Friday, Saturday and Sunday to…plan my summer course, which began today. Thus, the title of this post; I am the architect of my own exhaustion, made so by thinking that it would be fine to turn around and begin teaching a new class mere days after the semester ended.
Oi.
More relevant information, however, (or at least information that reeks less of sniveling and more of content) is that the course is a two-week “summer immersion” course on personal essay filmmaking. I’m lucky enough to be team-teaching with my colleague and partner-in-crime, Megan F. We hope that the course will optimize the intersection of our individual pedagogical interests/proclivities: film and personal essay, respectively.
As we began to plan this course, we were greatly influenced by two particular resources: the Center for Social Media at American University and the Center for Digital Storytelling located in Berkeley, California. Both offer descriptions and definition of this genre, as well as extensive pedagogical and theoretical tools/strategies to initiate, shape, and create a personal essay film. We’ve spent quite a bit of time thinking about how we want to name the products that our students are going to create. No one quite seems to know what to call this genre. Names include everything from “digital story” to “auto-documentary.” The advantage of personal essay film, we hope, is that it gestures toward a form that students and readers might be familiar with, and this allows us to draw upon work that they’ve already done—a step that’s particularly crucial because of our very short time together.
Already this morning, we’ve read John Price’s short essay “Good Workers” and viewed Ruth Ozeki’s short film “Halving the Bones.” Both, we thought, would be good examples of particular moves that personal essay writers/filmmakers do: they set up scenes, they use details, they introduce evidence that imparts authority and authenticity, they use symbols, etc. [These are all points that our students came up with as they read/viewed. Smart, right?]
So there you have it in a nutshell; why I’ve been off the map for so long, and where I’m going to be for the next two weeks. I imagine that I’ll update here with some “notes from the field” of teaching a new class in a new genre. Hopefully, I’ll also have a minute or two to write about the films I’ll be prepping (Ross McElwee’s Bright Leaves? Moore’s Roger and Me?), as well some stuff about the ever-elusive “summer reading” category. Heck, maybe I’ll ever blog something interesting. You never know. Stay tuned.
**[Wow. She who doesn't blog for weeks gets a bit rusty, no?]**
GoogleReader-1; Bloglines-0 April 7, 2007
Posted by kmiddleton in new media, reading, whining.3 comments
In a post awhile ago, I enthused wholeheartedly about using Bloglines. Instead of spending my time combing assiduously through my carefully-constructed list of bookmarks, I could simply log in and read everything in one fell swoop. Bliss!
And then the Chuds came. Or, less metaphorically speaking, the semester hit full speed and I stopped reading anything online that didn’t relate directly to my classes, or First Year Experience, or American Studies, or electronic portfolios. All very interesting, but not quite the kind of thing I was going to add to my folders of RSS feeds.
Of course, then you know what happens: you let Bloglines go too long, and you can’t face going back in there. I had read some particular sites here and there, when I had time (because there’s always time for the Fug girls. Always.). I pictured combing through mountains of old posts for every feed I had. After all, I hadn’t logged into Bloglines since the end of February. Was it better to actually allot 3 hours to fixing all the folders, or better simply to mark everything as read and move on? I could neither face the idea of having to read everything nor could I stand the thought of missing something good by deleting it all. I can’t decide if this is a larger phenomenon in the information age, or simply indicative of my own paranoia about managing information…
This morning, I bit the bullet and logged in. Imagine my surprise to discover that many of the folders I had dreaded the most (Will Richardson’s, for instance, which is always packed with great ideas, and updated daily, if not more often) had 4-5 posts in them. Panic! Had people DIED?! A quick check of their websites calmed those irrational fears. They had been posting happily at the same pace. For some reason, however, Bloglines had just dumped the posts from the entire month of March. !!! A short tour of some blogs (done through bookmarks, of course) confirms that I’m not alone: apparently BL is particularly inconsistent with WordPress blogs.
So, that’s it. I’m jumping ship. GoogleReader has been happily capturing and holding the feeds from my students’ blogs all semester, without a glitch. Bloglines is dead to me. This does mean, however, that I’ve got to schedule some time to play with the other functions of GoogleReader. I have to imagine that it has something akin to my favorite feature in Bloglines—i.e., the clippings file (which I consider the internet’s gift to academics). But until I have time to sit down and play with it, everything’s going to have to pile up in folders. Ah, the circle of information life…
Should be Reading, Grading, Writing a Paper… April 1, 2007
Posted by kmiddleton in pop culture, reading, whining.4 comments
But instead, I’m taking personality quizzes on the internet. Courtesy of my colleague, Kate Laity, writer, medievalist, and pop culture maven.
So on the grand scale of goddesses, who am I?
You are most like the Egyptian goddess Isis.
The story of Isis illustrates the transformative powers of sorrow to create wisdom. When she was separated from her husband Osiris, she searched for him everywhere; she used the power of her love to bring him back to life and conceive a child of him, Horus. Isis was worshiped in ancient Egypt as the great mother goddess of the universe. Goddesses with similar attributes include Kuan Yin, Tara and Oya.
Want to try it yourself? Here’s the link.
Most of this I think we have to take as ironic; I hardly think that the power of my love for anything (with the important exception of really cute shoes) would bring it back to life. And I’m no mother goddess, that’s for darn sure. The connection to Kuan Yin, however, is an interesting one. I’m not quite sure how Isis maps onto KY as a legend; but if they are in some ways equivalent, then I can surely relate to the Kuan Yin legend about trying to save people from suffering and having one’s head split into eleven pieces. Often described as both a bodhisattva and the “goddess of mercy,” Kuan Yin has an interesting place in Asian American literary history: she is the narrator in Maxine Hong Kingston’s Tripmaster Monkey. Readers/scholars have noted that as a narrator, she’s both a gentle observer of the shenanigans of the protagonist, Wittman Ah Sing, but also an incisive critic of his internalized racism and sexism.
Now that’s a vision of goddess-hood that I can get behind.
And now, off to grade! And read! And write a paper!
The Tortoise and the Hare March 26, 2007
Posted by kmiddleton in new media, whining.1 comment so far
Holy cow! Do I have a blog? I totally forgot that!!
In all honesty, it’s been a doozy of a couple of weeks. What’s going on, you ask?
- The American Studies Program (which, ahem, I happen to run) is beginning a search for a job candidate. Lots of file reading, discussion, drafting of questions, interviews. Fascinating stuff, but time consuming.
- I visited the good people at LaGuardia Community College, and got the scoop on their nationally-recognized work with ePortfolios. The faculty and staff at LG should be nationally-recognized for their collegiality and willingness to give advice. Shout out!
- I worked out a preliminary draft of my co-written article on J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace, which will be included in a book of essays.
- I was here this weekend, introducing our keynote speakers, Jennifer Baumgardner and Amy Richards, authors of Manifesta and Grassroots. Like the folks at LaGuardia, Baumgardner and Richards are paragons of engaged and knowledgeable conversation—such generous intellects.
- In between, I’ve taught some classes, ushered my students through advisement for fall 2007, attended committee meetings, department meetings, pilot program committees, answered avalanches of email…you get the picture.
So in one way, I feel as if I’ve been running and running and running now for about 2 weeks. My blog, however, is languishing. Doesn’t it look like I’ve been simply poking along? Can one be the hare and the tortoise, simultaneously?
For some real content in this post, rather than just whining, I’ll share an anecdote that may have some interesting material applicable to media culture. Over the last couple of days, as a reward for doing some work, I’ve been experimenting with iTunes. In the past, I’ve focused mainly on exploring iTunes for single songs that I wanted to download, but since the program has gone through so many updates over the past year, I’ve been trying to see what else it can do. So I’ve downloaded a game or two, and just signed up for a podcast subscription to “This American Life” (since I don’t get Showtime and can’t see Ira Glass on television). [NOTE TO SELF: wouldn't it be a great idea for a class to use TAL as the primary text? You could run it as an American Studies course, in which students could research the various interdisciplinary components that go into particular essays; it would also be a great writing class, which would result in audio essays.]
So, here I am, thinking: “well, I’m working toward efficiently utilizing iTunes. I have some unmentionable number of pop tunes that I load up and take to the gym with me, and I’m experimenting with the other kinds of downloadable media offered by Apple.” Hours after I pat myself on the back for my long-tail adoption of iTunes technology (and no, I haven’t even dipped my toe in the Limewire field–particularly not if anyone in the FBI is reading this), I have a conversation with my spouse, in which we discuss how we need to acquire particular kinds of music classics. Usually, these conversations revolve around Beatles and Led Zeppelin albums (two of the many bands not stocked by iTunes). This time, however, the classics in question were Wagner’s Ring Cycle pieces. And in my head, I was still picturing the need to physically go down to the music store and acquire CDs (or at least order them up on Amazon). It took me several minutes to realize that iTunes would, of course, stock opera as well as Gwen Stefani’s new single. That echo you may hear is the resounding thwack of my hand hitting my forehead.
The thing I’m puzzling over is why I was blinded to the concept of non-popular music on iTunes. It may well have something to do with the ways in which new media has, for much of its new life, been the site of contemporary culture and discourse. As time goes on, however, new media is also becoming the site of recovery and preservation of old media. If it’s significant that iTunes has an “essentials” list for music beginning with Gregorian Chant, it’s also significant that YouTube features the first films of the Lumiere brothers. I assume that there is an audience out there, then, that does not differentiate these texts with clear cut temporal distinctions; i.e., for some users, the idea that digital video is now a convenient way of accessing some of the very first celluloid films is not particularly ironic. And more interesting: is the YouTube manifestation of the Lumiere films simply preservation of old media via new media, or is the media itself changed by it’s repositioning?
Clearly I’m rusty from lack of blogging. Let me get in a bit more practice, and perhaps I can begin to answer my own questions.
