I'm liking this Academy 2.0 idea a lot. I agree with Collin and Alex that more mashed-up, collaborative, networked, open source-style public peer production is going on every day. Collin already mentioned the Teaching Carnivals, but I want to go a little further with the whole idea of carnivals. A carnival, in case you hadn't heard this term before, is a collaborative effort to harness good, recent posts on a specific topic. For science, there's Tangled Bank, then there's the History Carnival, the Asian History Carnival, Carnivalesque for early modern history, the Philosopher's Carnival, the Skeptics' Circle, and the Carnival of Bad History. Each carnival consists of a list of links to posts that meet the criteria for the carnival. Usually the person who hosts the carnival provides a one-sentence description of the post.

What are these, if not distributed scholarly journals? It's true that they don't have length requirements and that they're not refereed...well, they're not refereed in the traditional sense of gatekeeping. The posts are still reviewed and commented upon, but in the comments sections of the blogs or on other blogs. Point is, carnivals are clearly intended to be scholarship, however informal, and their resemblance to scholarly journals should be noted. For example, here's one I'm excited about that's taking the resemblance to a new level: the newest Feminist Carnival, which is doing a special issue on 1970s feminist thought. From Sour Duck's Call for Submissions (sound familiar?):

Yes, there's a theme: 1970s feminist thought. However, this won't be a nostalgic look at "second-wave feminism". Oh no. I'm looking for pieces that engage with the themes and ideas of 1970s feminism, while applying them to current events, or looking to the future.

You might say it's a "1970s into 2000" Feminist Carnival issue.

Examples of topics to consider:

• women and men in the workplace (e.g., creating an even playing field, and equal pay for equal work)




• reproductive freedom (with the advent of "the pill") & sexual liberation ("sex is fun!")




• healthcare reform (1970s feminists took on the medical establishment and effected significant change. What else needs to be changed? Can 1970s tactics prove effective again?)

Technorati tag: Academy2.0

By the way, don't forget the next Teaching Carnival at Scrivenings. The 1970s into 2000 Feminist Carnival issue will appear on November 16, which is right around the time Scrivener will be posting the new Teaching Carnival.

I like to ask people this question if we're just sitting around talking about nothing in particular. It's always interesting to hear everyone's answers, especially if they qualify them -- if they think they're MUCH better at one than the other -- and if they explain why they think this is the case. Most people say they're far better writers than speakers.

For my part, I think I'm a MUCH better speaker than I am a writer. I wonder how sending a speaking sample instead of a writing sample would go over?

So how about you? What are you better at, writing or speaking? Hey, and if you've read my academic writing and heard me give a talk, you're welcome to express your agreement or disagreement with my assessment.

Inspired in part by Bradley's running posts, but also by my tendency to get bored with one type of exercise and switch around periodically, I've been getting on the treadmill lately. Before I was a stairmaster gal.

Today I tried doing a jog/walk combination, pushing myself, but not too hard. Really I was jogging absently while watching talk shows and sometimes, just for silliness, pretending I was running from the invisible monster in Lost. I wanted to get a baseline reading of how much distance I could cover in 30 minutes, and it ended up being two miles. I'm not in great shape, but that's not too bad, and I know I can improve.

A colleague of mine emailed me yesterday asking me to explain my impression of the differences among del.icio.us, CiteULike, and H2O Playlists. I thought I'd post it here as a public service, and hopefully you guys will chime in if you see other differences.

To be sure, they're all services that let you create an assemblage of links and tag them however you like and share them with others. They're all social bookmarking tools that enable you and others to make folksonomies. Here are the differences as I see them:

del.icio.us: del.icio.us is for anything. The funny, the weird, the academic, the provocative, the artistic -- everything on the web. It doesn't tout itself as an academic service. You just find links and put them there. I think lots of people just use it so that they can get to their bookmarks from any computer. But if you want to take advantage of the "social" part, you can browse del.icio.us for people and content in several ways, five of which immediately come to mind: 1.) by skimming the front page, 2.) by looking at tag clouds, 3.) by clicking on the usernames of people who posts links, 4.) by clicking on the "and XX other people" links to see who-all linked to a particular page, and, if you find people whose taste in links you like, 5.) by subscribing to those people's RSS feeds so that you're alerted when they add new links. Full disclosure: I use de.lirio.us, not del.icio.us, but they're used the same ways. The only difference is that de.lirio.us is open source.

CiteULike: CiteULike self-identifies as a service for helping academics organizing their scholarly bibliographies. You can find people and stuff on CiteULike using the same methods as on del.icio.us. The main thing that makes CiteULike different is that it's synced up with Amazon and JSTOR, as well as other indexes. It's one of those metadata miracles. From the FAQ:

The system currently supports: AIP Scitation, Amazon, American Geophysical Union, American Meteorological Society, Anthrosource, Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) portal, BMJ, CiteSeer, IEEE Xplore, IngentaConnect, JSTOR, MathSciNet, MetaPress, NASA Astrophysics Data System, Nature, PLoS Biology, PubMed, PubMed Central, Science, ScienceDirect, SpringerLink, Usenix, Wiley InterScience, arXiv.org e-Print archive, but you can post any other article from any non-supported site on the web - you'll just have to type the citation details in yourself.

Another big difference between CiteULike and other social bookmarking tools is that you can export your CiteULike bibliography to Endnote or BibTeX.

H2O Playlists: This service is provided through the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, and it has a progressive open-access, Creative Commons ethos. It's influenced by MIT's OpenCourseWare and other open education initiatives. If you watch this Flash movie about H2O, you'll see how strongly they're emphasizing teaching and learning. Users are required to publish their playlists with Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike licenses, which makes the whole site more collaborative. For example, on each playlist, there's a link that says "Create new playlist based on this one," so users can create derivative playlists with one click (and that's one way people can find each other in addition to the standard tag-surfing -- "tagging along," perhaps). Unlike most other social bookmarking tools, users can't tag one item, but rather they assemble lists of items and tag the lists. For example, I have this list on cyberfeminism. On the list, I have Faith Wilding's article "Where is Feminism in Cyberfeminism?" I can't tag that article, but the whole list has the tags feminism, gender, cyberfeminism, technofeminism, girlculture, cyberculture, women, femininity, and masculinity. Because playlists are meant to be kind of like syllabuses, H2O lets you break the lists into categories, like units or modules.*

Look at my playlist on Women and Gender in Open Source/Geek/Hacker Culture, for example. It has three categories. It also displays my other playlists, links to other playlists derived from mine, playlists with the same items, and playlists with the same tags. These features aren't available on other social bookmarking sites. Finally, H2O lets readers leave comments, email playlists to others, and print out printer-friendly versions of the playlists, also features that aren't available with other tools. So you can see that H2O bears little similarity to these other tools.

Notice that I haven't even bothered to address the cultural differences among the tools, the folks behind the folksonomies. On del.icio.us, for example, you can find all kinds of weird stuff, like...oh I don't know...a 30,000 calorie, 7-pound sandwich. Plus, some people have fun with the tag names, whereas on CiteULike and H2O people don't get too far afield of appropriate disciplinary terminology. Jonathan gets a little creative with it, but I get the sense that he's the exception. He, and probably some others, certainly help to diversify the tag pool. Whereas many users might have been inclined to tag the article "Rithmomachia, the Great Medieval Number Game" as "medieval history" and "mathematics," which are very common tags, Jonathan chose to tag it as "rithomomachia" and "game_theory." I think there's something to be said for that.

* Come to think of it, as I continue to work on my job materials, I believe I'll take the sketches of courses I'd like to develop and teach and put those on H2O.

Heh, ever since John Holbo used that phrase on The Valve, I've been thinking about how apt it is.

Kristine Blair and Pamela Takayoshi, in their introduction to Feminist Cyberscapes: Mapping Gendered Academic Spaces, describe mass media representations of women on the Internet. According to the famous MCI commercial, there is no gender on the Internet. But some other stories have told the cautionary tale of the woman who became addicted to online chat and neglected her husband and children, eventually running off with some man she met online:

The narratives offered in the commercial and the news magazine segment tell two different stories about technology -- the MCI commercial asserts a utopian vision in which we use technology to rise above our material conditions, while the story of female computer addiction suggests a rhetoric of excess in which the promised escape from our material existence positions us as victims. Together, these narratives suggest that a blanket acceptance or rejection of the Internet as an empowering site for women does not account for the complicated relationships between women and technology in their personal and professional lives. (1999, p. 2, emphasis mine)

They go on to cite stories in other mass media publications about the obsessive use by some of online pornography and online harassment (cyber-stalking). At every turn, it's a rhetoric of excess. Likewise with women and blogging. So-called "mommy bloggers" are obsessive, self-absorbed hyperparents. Same with those silly teenaged girls on LiveJournal. What makes them think anyone would actually want to read about their daily minutiae?

The last two days have been gray and overcast. Taken with my stress, this has resulted in listening to melancholy, wistful music (Crowded House) while doing work (dissertation and job applications) and counting the hours until my show comes on (Sunday night Simpsons/Family Guy, Monday night Prison Break).

Excess self. I'm definitely sluicing it off in this meandering post.

Dwight K. Schrute, a character on The Office, has a blog. I don't know if he's the David counterpart or the Gareth counterpart, as I've only watched a few minutes of the U.S. version of The Office. At any rate, it kind of amuses me that this character has a blog. Kind of like that blog Barbie used to have that she doesn't have anymore.

Know who else has a blog? Chris Matthews. It's called HARDBLOGGER. Oh my.

The following is a series of quotations from Douglas Hesse's article, "Persuading as storying: Essays, narrative rhetoric and the college writing course." (In Richard Andrews, ed. Narrative and Argument (pp. 106-117). Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1989.) Yes, that's 1989, and I'll admit, I hadn't happened upon it until just recently. But remember that commercial NBC used one summer to advertise their reruns? "If you haven't seen it before...it's new to you!" I don't have much to add, except that I hadn't thought about narrative and argument in such a closely aligned way before. I'm seeing some similarities to Burke's theory of form from "Psychology and Form" in Counter-Statement. But mostly I'm just impressed with the way Hesse so lucidly sets forth the debates about narrative's place in composition pedagogy. I'm curious to see what the rest of you think about it. Now for the quotations; the remainder of this post consists of Hesse's words only.

"my argument does not rest on narrative as 'an easier, first mode' for young writers. It does not rest on narrative as the best means for developing 'voice.' It does not rest on narrative as the best way to teach students the importance of detail. It does not rest on narrative as a way to introduce the concept of 'thesis' through an Aesop's-Fables-like attachment of meaning to experience. Instead, my argument for narrative rests on its function as a powerful persuasive strategy, one which derives force not from hierarchical logic but from the emplotment of propositions. To put this another way, I suggest shifting our attention from narrative as a type of proof to narrative as a form of argument. To put it a third way, I argue that the best classical account of the persuasive effect of narrative in non-fictional texts is not Aristotle's Rhetorica but his De Poetica, especially the Poetics as read by Paul Ricoeur. (p. 106)

"In the ongoing pedagogical battles between teaching experiential writing and teaching expository/rhetorical writing, champions of the latter make two main arguments. The first, an economic one, assumes the scarcity of personal narrative both in other academic settings and in that golden 'real world' of work after college. Storytelling is dismissed as a largely belletristic exercise that deprives students of writing more apparently susceptible to financial reward. The second, more serious challenge, comes from a different quarter. This charge is that overemphasizing narrative inhibits intellectual growth because it privileges a simplistic mode of cognition. Narrative is 'natural' or 'unavoidable,' the argument begins. Because we narrate all of the time yet we do not naturally construct systematic analyses and syntheses of written texts, the latter activities are more significant to college writing curricula. This argument lies beyond economics, its justification the loftier one of cognitive development. [. . .] Combined, these two arguments pose a serious challenge. If classroom narratives appear to bear no resemblance to real world writing (which often means writing directly susceptible to financial reward), and if writing them appears to contribute little to developing real world skills, what place do they have in writing classes, especially when aesthetic or personal growth rationales are out of favour? (p. 107)

"narrative does not equal autobiography"

I have reviewed the conventional wisdom regarding proof through storytelling. It boils down to two tenets: first, that the highest virtue a story in an expository writing class has is to recreate reality so faithfully that readers feel like 'they were there'; second, that when readers assign a meaning to experience faithfully told, that meaning should be stated or statable as a thesis -- that the story proves the thesis. (p. 108)

"essays with stories" -- story serves to prove or illustrate a point
"stories as essays" -- narration of events (Orwell "A Hanging")
"essays as stories" --
"(Note the distinction I'm making between stories as essays and essays as stories; the latter do not strictly consist of reported events of 'things that happened' in 'the real world', the relation of experience, for example. Rather, such essays are story-like in their form; they present propositions and report and exposition in a narrative form, this 'causing' that, so that the entire essay has the shape and, as I'll argue later, the persuasive force of story.)" (p. 109)

"to the extent that essays are emplotted they persuade by appealing to their readers' sense of well-formedness, both in their familiarity with stories, nurtured by their desire for concordance." (p. 112)

"Instead of action consisting of 'physical events as they happen in the world' -- in other words, what composition textbooks mean by 'narrative' as opposed to 'non-narrative' parts of essays -- action might be seen instead as movement and narrative as the creation of plot. We would do well, then, to consider the sense in which essays can be viewed as being emplotted, their propositions as events in the essay as story. When Orwell asserts, 'When the white man turns tyrant it is his own freedom that he destroys', he gives it a place in the essay as story. The stating of the proposition is an event caused, as it were, by prior events." (p. 113)

Coherence depends on the entailment of assertions, an orderly movement of mind reflected in a sequential interconnection of statements; readers perceive coherence when they perceive the force of a work's entailments (Knoblauch and Brannon 1984, pp. 70-2). An author, therefore, who is able to present something well-formed persuades largely by allowing the reader easily to perceive form. The power arcs between ethical appeal ('Here is someone who is able to form well, so what he says must be true') and the creation of something where there was nothing: 'Here is a constellation. Without a competing version, why should I doubt its existence?' Given the apparent primacy of narrative and story, what more compelling way to reveal form?" (p. 113)

"The power of narrative in essays comes from assertions offered in a shape that is attractive because it is so familiar. 'Story' is a form of narrative argument in the way that 'syllogism' is of logical."

"Argument by narrative draws its power from the reader's involvement in configuring a text."
"Encouraging narrativity in readers involves them in the enterprise of the essay. The result is a rhetorical advantage similar to the one that accrues with such strategies as 'showing, not telling.' Inviting, even forcing, the reader to construct a sense of order in the text makes him or her complicit with the writer. Power comes to writers when they give essays the shape of story because of a fundamental disposition we have toward stories. The rhetorical value of stories, then, is participatory, not logical." (p. 114)

"Writing teachers need to recognize the limitations of textbook depictions of narrative. In particular, we need to recognize that stressing the attachment of 'points' to stories neglects how a narrative may function less as a chunk of evidence than as a form of argument. We should discuss with students how stories can be used not only as bits of proof but also as means of transport, ways of getting readers from place to place, from idea to idea in essays." (p. 116)

Inspired in part by Erin's sweet potato gumbo and the Martha Stewart dish I described:

I made a soup tonight that I thought might turn out nasty but is really good, so I'm calling it "Dubious Chicken Soup":

1 parsnip, chopped
1 onion, chopped
1 sweet potato, chopped
~2 tablespoons olive oil
12 chicken thighs, cooked in Major Grey's chutney (I used about half a jar)
several cloves of garlic, chopped (not minced)
brown rice noodles (however much you want)
1 container chicken broth
1 can great northern beans, washed

Bake 6 chicken thighs in Major Grey's chutney (350 degrees). Once they're fully cooked, remove the chicken breasts from the Corningware dish (or whatever you have) and put the next six chicken breasts, the onion, and the garlic in to cook in the yummy mixture of chutney and chicken fat. In a different baking dish, roast the sweet potatoes and parsnips; drizzle them with olive oil first. Cook brown rice noodles according to instructions on the bag, but undercook them so that they're extra al dente. Dice all cooked chicken. Put northern beans, sweet potatoes, parsnips, noodles, onion/garlic/chutney/chicken fat mixture, chicken broth, and chicken into a large pot. Boil for a few minutes and then simmer as desired.

I made a little maple syrup and mustard dressing to try with some of those roasted sweet potatoes and parsnips. It was DELICIOUS.

Can you use ghee just like you'd use regular butter? In my case, this means: put a little bit in jasmine rice as it's cooking, cook scrambled eggs with it, or put it on corn on the cob. Will it taste okay? Will my kitchen burst into flames?

Edited to add: Can I use ghee to grease a cookie sheet? Also, not ghee-related, but I bought the stuff to try two side dishes I heard about on Martha Stewart's new midmorning show: sweet potatoes and parsnips, roasted in the oven and covered in a maple syrup and dijon mustard dressing, and brussels sprouts roasted in the oven with bacon, with a little balsamic vinegar on them.