First, some old stuff I should have blogged weeks ago: the posts at Crooked Timber and 11D about Unequal Childhoods, a monograph by sociologist Annette Lareau. The book description from Amazon, for expediency:

Class does make a difference in the lives and futures of American children. Drawing on in-depth observations of black and white middle-class, working-class, and poor families, Unequal Childhoods explores this fact, offering a picture of childhood today. Here are the frenetic families managing their children's hectic schedules of "leisure" activities; and here are families with plenty of time but little economic security. Lareau shows how middle-class parents, whether black or white, engage in a process of "concerted cultivation" designed to draw out children's talents and skills, while working-class and poor families rely on "the accomplishment of natural growth," in which a child's development unfolds spontaneously--as long as basic comfort, food, and shelter are provided. Each of these approaches to childrearing brings its own benefits and its own drawbacks. In identifying and analyzing differences between the two, Lareau demonstrates the power, and limits, of social class in shaping the lives of America's children.

Admittedly, I haven't read the book, and I'm sure Lareau probably accounts for this, but I don't recall reading in the threads at 11D or Crooked Timber any consideration of families in which one parent is middle class and the other is working class (obviously the class position of the family would be one or the other -- or neither. I'm talking about the class backgrounds of the parents). Presumably, assuming each parent is equally involved in childrearing, the child would get some of both "concerted cultivation" and "accomplishment of natural growth."

Alex Reid has some interesting thoughts about not getting podcasting. He gets it, of course; the thing is, he just isn't all that impressed, heh.

How Tyler Cowen cooks blackened fish.

The only pictures that were taken of me at CCCC.

I command it! Read this review of the new collection of Elizabeth Bishop's previously unpublished poetry, Edgar Allan Poe & the Juke-Box. And listen to this interview/slide show with Alice Quinn, the editor of the collection. Seriously, I do command it.

While you're at the New Yorker's site, read Relatively Deprived, a critique of how the poverty rate is calculated.

It's been a while since you got a dissertation update, hasn't it? Well, in the words-on-paper sense, I have a zero draft of the whole thing. 206 pages of something. I'm so lost and confused with the theory I'm using (too many conceptual tools to choose from, nothing that seems to lend itself to a systematic application, etc.) that for chapters 3 and 5, I decided simply to write the chapters saying what I wanted to say about the "Where are the women?" case, then add the theory in later once I know WTF I'm doing with it. I know that's a pretty wack approach to scholarship, but hey, by hook or by crook, right?

My biggest problem is that I'm frustrated with the whole. I would love to be able to have this tight, coherent dissertation with a sequential, step-by-step analytical structure that a reader can anticipate and follow easily, a dissertation that would make sense even if all one saw was the table of contents. I had a good friend in my master's program at Tennessee, Shauna Bryant, whose thesis was like that. Observe the lovely flow:

Chapter One: Introduction_______________________________________________1
A Definition of Technical Communication______________________________________1
A Definition of Ethics________________________________________________________8
Chapter Two: Review of the Literature_____________________________________12
The Social Contingency of Communication____________________________________12
Foundational Ethical Theories_______________________________________________30
Nonfoundational Ethical Theories____________________________________________33
Chapter Three: Foundational Ethics ______________________________________39
Universal Values __________________________________________________________42
Utilitarianism_____________________________________________________________48
Kantian Ethics____________________________________________________________55
Problems with Foundational Ethical Theories__________________________________59
The Need for Nonfoundational Considerations in Foundational Ethics______________69
Chapter Four: Nonfoundational Ethics____________________________________70
Dialogic Ethics____________________________________________________________76
Professional Ethics_________________________________________________________85
Problems with Nonfoundational Ethical Theories_______________________________94
The Need for Foundational Considerations in Nonfoundational Ethics_____________102
Chapter Five: Contextual Foundational Ethics_____________________________103
Markel’s (Contextual Foundational) Ethic____________________________________104
Examining Contextual Foundational Ethics___________________________________109
Alleviating Nonfoundational Ethics’ Lack of Emphasis on the Individual __________113
Alleviating Foundational Ethics’ Over-reliance on the Individual_________________120
Alleviating Foundational Ethics’ Dependence on Ends__________________________125
Alleviating Nonfoundational Ethics’ Impracticality_____________________________132
Conclusion______________________________________________________________140

Bradley Dilger's dissertation is the same way. How I envy their ordered minds:

1. I had a weird dream last night. In it, there was this cutting-edge fanfic software program which would read your mind for fanfic ideas and show them on the screen, with the original sets and actors and everything. I don't know how it worked, maybe using one of those bioports like in eXistenZ or something? Anyway, my crossover was Lost and Firefly, in which Serenity's crew came to the island to help the survivors fight The Others. I woke up when it got too violent and they started turning on each other. Kaylee and Sun were hitting each other with hammers and kicking each other, and I got too disturbed.

2. If there are any southern literature folks reading: I want to read a novel by Lee Smith. Which one should I start with? I'm guessing either Fair and Tender Ladies or Oral History, but is there another possibility?

A 4Cs wrapup post is long overdue. I saw just about everyone I wanted to see, plus met some great new people, including Madeleine, Tyra, jo(e), Deb, timna, Steve, Bradley, Brendan, and Sharon.

I attended some sessions, but I didn't always take notes. I know there are many defenders of the "read a paper" presentation model, but I have less and less patience for it with each passing year. It does sometimes work okay, but only rarely, and only if there are enough extemporaneously spoken asides to keep the audience's attention. The cadence of reading is so very different from extemporaneous speaking -- so much less animated and more monotonous -- that, for me, it's almost impossible to follow. I'm in agreement with William Major that we should do conference presentations more like how we teach.

My paper follows below the fold (and my slides are attached to this post). It looks disjointed, but I spoke extemporaneously a lot of the material. That's what I usually do at conferences: I have either no paper at all and just some notecards, or a paper with cues like this one. I hope you get something out of it. NB: Links to the original article and all the posts I cite are here.

NB: Mike Edwards contributed heavily to these notes. In fact, most of what's here is his work, so I want him to get credit for it.

The CCCC Blogging SIG had a large and productive meeting Thursday night in Chicago. We began by discussing some of the initiatives the SIG had proposed the previous year, including the one-page paper handout guide for teachers new to blogging (which, we might hope, will continue to be revised collaboratively and kept up to date as necessary), as well as thoughts about assessment of weblog writing, outcomes of weblog use in writing courses and professional endeavors, and a possible large multi-institution study investigating the classroom uses of weblogs.

Following the initial discussion, we split up into five small groups focusing on action in specific areas. The groups discussed their areas and reported back when we reconvened. Here are the results of our discussion:

1. Securing grant funding for a large, qualitative multi-institution study on weblogs in writing pedagogy: This group thought it would be most appropriate to start with simply laying out the steps in the grant-writing process. So:
   1. Put out open call for researchers on Kairosnews and other weblogs: have you done classroom- based blog research, and would you be willing to share the results? (This, initially, might likely involve a simple survey with questions about the number of students involved, the longevity of the study, what the classes were (tech comm? FYC? Advanced composition? Literature courses? etc.), and so forth.)
   2. Mine past CCCC programs for presentations on qualitative blog studies to get a sense of what classroom research people have already done on blogs.
   3. Use the information gathered to shape the drafting of possible research questions focused on the consequences of assigning weblog work. (Feedback here with considerations for shaping those questions is welcomed!)
   4. Review grant guidelines again given the information gathered. (CCCC research initiative and the NCTE Citigroup technology grant are possibilities; again, other suggestions are welcomed.)
   5. Compose a budget. (Possible line items include funding for research assistants to code data, consultants with expertise in qualitative research, SRSS software.)
   6. Flesh out the grant proposal, especially with expected outcomes from the study. (One possibility suggested might be an annotated bibliography, in the manner of Bedford, of weblog scholarship.)
2. Assessment and outcomes considerations for weblogs and teaching, possibly including questions of genre (Facebook, MySpace, et cetera). This group analytically framed its approach as a highly specific (and provocative) question: what constitutes an "outcome" for a single blog post? Top-down solutions for constructing outcomes seem problematic, so what happens if we look for a Web 2.0-style bottom-up mode of analysis; using "dynamic criteria mapping" to see how evaluative criteria (as tags) cluster themselves, and possibly setting up a space for that online -- what would that look like? (Well, let's do it and see!)
3. Institutional blogging / social software considerations. Action here seems fairly straightforward: Compose a position statement to push to the resolution committee next year; something that covers comprehensively all these areas we're talking about, partly to help move away from the problems of ad- hocracy.
4. Weblogs and professionalization. Again, fairly straightforward: we need to move the profession towards a space where we're more aware of blogging as professional activity. To what degree can we "get credit" for blogging? And, deriving from that, how can we start thinking about blogging as professionals? (One question that was asked in response: if blogging becomes a professional activity, does it lose some portion of its value as teaching/writing tool?) It might be useful to compile blog posts that illustrate the professional virtues of blogging (viz. Deborah Hawhee's post in order to respond to those frequent doubts and questions about the professional value of blogging. There's a need, as well, to map and illustrate (viz. Clancy's map of p2p review) for our colleagues how academic interaction operates on blogs.
5. Rethinking the design and architecture of weblogs and other social software tools as a necessary component of our discipline, and possibly thinking about weblogs as a "gateway technology." With blogging, there's a need to move beyond composition's ubiquitous pedagogical imperative and ask other questions: perhaps about the pitfalls of institutional support (e.g., those who see it as not "cool" to use university blog spaces because of the perceived lack of "ownership"); about how to aggregate or represent or link to student work (e.g., the question of whether to use a hub or a distributed model; about doing more work with design rather than plugging content into preexisting templates.

So: an ambitious agenda, with lots of stuff to do. The next necessary question would seem to be: are there people who would be willing to shepherd these projects, either individually or collaboratively? Finally, two questions and an announcement:

• Would it perhaps be useful and productive to merge the efforts of the Blogging SIG and the Wiki Rhetoricians SIG -- perhaps into the CCCC Social Software SIG?
• Would a SIG blog be useful? (Consensus: yes.) There seemed to be broad agreement that the easiest solution might be adding a SIG category for posts at Kairosnews. [Done.--Clancy]
• And now the announcement: During the meeting, Collin proposed that Kairos name the Best Academic Weblog award after John Lovas. We felt that it was the best idea presented the whole night. Mike emailed Doug Eyman, who wholeheartedly agreed. Thanks to everyone for a great meeting.

Cross-posted at Kairosnews.

Technorati tag: cccc-2006

They're talking about us over at The Valve. I want to (and probably will) say something, but it's hard to know where to start.

I'll soon be leaving for CCCC in Chicago. If you're around and want to meet up, consider attending Jo(e)'s Breakfast with Bloggers, or if you can't make that, just send me an email and maybe we can organize something else.

Last seen at Slaves of Academe, the newest music meme: "Simple directions: use the shuffle function on your music player and see what you come up with in answer to the following questions."

How does the world see you?
Some Kinda Lover -- Apollonia 6

Will I have a happy life?
Now That We've Found Love -- Heavy D & the Boyz

What do my friends really think of me?
Poison -- Bell Biv DeVoe

Do people secretly lust after me?
California -- Joni Mitchell

How can I make myself happy?
Another Thing Comin' -- Judas Priest

What should I do with my life?
Shoot -- Sonic Youth

Will I ever have children?
I Don't Know Where I Stand -- Joni Mitchell

What is some good advice for me?
In My House -- Mary Jane Girls

How will I be remembered?
Dark Ships -- Cycle Sluts from Hell

What is my signature dancing song?
Always on Time -- Ja Rule feat. Ashanti

What do I think my current theme song is?
Chapel Hill -- Sonic Youth

What does everyone else think my current theme song is?
Stand Back -- Stevie Nicks

What song will play at my funeral?
Baby Love Child -- Pizzicato Five

What type of men/women do you like?
Looks That Kill -- Mötley Crüe

What is my day going to be like?
Jamaican Ska -- Fishbone