Blogging

As if one weren't already in progress! I'm in Atlanta, and I have a chapter 5 deadline for my dissertation writing group, ack. Regular blogging will resume around 10 February.

I figured it was time for a link roundup. Forgive the "Norm MacDonald imitating Larry King's bits" quality of the post:

Margo, Darling on hair. Margo just got her hair cut really short, and she reflects on it eloquently. It reminds me of college, when my hair was Mia Farrow short.

Not really an article to read, but check out the cover of In These Times. I'm going to have to go to Whole Foods to see if they have a copy. If not, the local co-op, where I should be shopping instead anyway.

Some evangelical Christians are also environmentalists. Find out about coalition-building ideas for the two groups. I say "two groups," but I know that the label "environmentalist" encompasses lots of different kinds of people.

Also at Campus Progress, a former pageant winner does a feminist analysis of pageantry.

The Little Professor has a smart take on plagiarism; see also the comments on the cross-post at The Valve.

When I saw this call for papers:

Professional Studies Review is now accepting articles for consideration for its Fall 2006 issue. This issue will be devoted to Women in the Profession. Suggested topics might include (but are not limited to) such issues as:

Feminist Pedagogy
Debunking Myths of Women in Academe
Patriarchal Expectations and Feminist Strategies in Colleges of Professional Studies
Tenure and Promotion
Women and Leadership in the Professional Colleges
Codes of Female Pedagogy
The University Classroom: A Woman’s Sphere?
Opening Doors and Shattering Glass Ceilings: Women and Promotion
Overrating and Underrating: Students Evaluation of Women Professors
Women Leading, Men Following: A New Professional Paradigm?
African-American and Hispanic representation among college teachers
What the Professions Should Be Doing
Strategies for Recruitment and Retention
Women’s Studies Courses
Salary/pay inequalities
Gender Trends in Professional Practice

Submissions should be written for scholars, teachers and graduate students who are not necessarily specialists in a professional field but are versed in the current research.

Submissions from younger scholars and graduate students are welcome.

Deadline for final submission: March 15, 2006

To receive author guidelines or journal information, contact:

Dr. Joseph Marotta, General Editor, email: marottaj@stjohns.edu or see the PSR website: http://new.stjohns.edu/academics/undergraduate/professionalstudies/journals/psr/psr.sju

I thought of this panel, which I don't remember seeing in the MLA program, so I don't know if it worked out. Anyway, don't you think this special issue would be strengthened by addressing the proliferation of pseudonymous weblogs by academic women? Also glaringly absent from this list: Issues related to having children and an academic career, a.k.a. tenure and toddlers. See also the November/December 2004 issue of Academe.

Well, I hope not, for obvious reasons. But I have to wonder when I see this:

Image in context here. I have to say that I was disappointed not to see this on The Comics Curmudgeon. Oh well.

Pi tagged me.

Four Jobs You’ve Had In Your Life:

1. Concession stand/ticket booth cashier at a movie theater
2. Hostess at Logan's Roadhouse
3. Model for figure drawing/painting classes
4. Comic book store employee (I filed Magic cards and bagged, boarded, and filed comic books)

Four Movies You Could Watch Over And Over:

1. Clueless
2. Rushmore
3. Star Trek: First Contact
4. The Bourne Identity

Four Places You’ve Lived:

1. My parents' house in Florence, AL
2. My apartment in Knoxville
3. That horrible apartment
4. The efficiency I live in now

Four TV Shows You Love To Watch:

1. Lost
2. The Sopranos
3. Alias
4. The Simpsons

Four Places You’ve Been On Vacation:

1. Myrtle Beach, SC
2. Destin, FL
3. Las Vegas
4. New York City

Four Blogs You Visit Daily:

1. The Valve
2. Prof. B.
3. New Kid
4. Girl Genius

Four Of Your Favorite Foods:

1. Chocolate mousse
2. Pizza with chicken, sun-dried tomatoes, and jalapeno peppers
3. Collard greens with cornbread
4. Potatoes, skin on, cut in the style of home fries, roasted in the oven with bacon, salt, pepper, leeks, and cloves of garlic

Four Places You’d Rather Be:

1. Atlanta, GA
2. The Tenure Track
3. On the porch at F.A. eating oysters on the half shell
4. Asheville, NC (everyone says it's nice; I'd love to find out)

Four Albums You Can’t Live Without:

1. Appetite for Destruction, Guns'n'Roses
2. Made in USA, Pizzicato Five
3. Miles of Aisles, Joni Mitchell
4. Easy Rider, Music from the Motion Picture Soundtrack

(so many runners-up: Diana Krall's Love Scenes and The Girl in the Other Room, Sade's Lovers Rock, Diamond Life, Promise, Love Deluxe, various albums from Lucinda Williams and Kasey Chambers, etc.)

Four Vehicles I’ve Owned:

1. A white 1990 Nissan 240SX
2. A black 1990 Buick Reatta
3. The car I drive now, a red 1998 Honda Civic
4. I had a go-cart; does that count...?

Four People To Be Tagged: If you haven't done it yet, you're one of the four!

Edited to add links to those who have heeded the call: GXX, bdegenaro, and John.

I might as well start my MLA panel-blogging with a report on my own session. It was titled "Digital Scholarly Publishing: Beyond the Crisis," and the other presenters were David Blakesley and Kristine Blair. Mary Hocks was also scheduled to present, but unfortunately she couldn't make it.

After Kris introduced us, I did my presentation. If you read my planning post, then you didn't miss anything. Still, I've attached my slides in .ppt format and in .sxi format for OpenOffice. I'd publish the whole thing here, but I generally don't present from scripts, and at the time I didn't think to open up Audacity and record the talk. Oh well. One point I think I made more clearly in the Q&A after my talk than in my post is that the MLA, CCCC, and several individual universities all have statements with guidelines for reviewing work with technology in the hiring, tenure, and promotion process. In every case, these documents support the scholars who work with technology and generally favor the legitimacy, or legitimation, of electronic publishing. Why, then, is it still so risky to do this work?

Dave talked about his work with The Writing Instructor, a print journal that has made the transition to electronic publishing. He had a handout, which I've copied in its entirety:

The Writing Instructor
Publishing since 1981 and now in its THIRD WAVE, TWI will feature...

• Interactive and distributed peer review
  Peer review is conducted Slashdot style, with scholarly review teams and multi-tiered response and feedback
• Born digital projects and printed archives
  Fostering hypertext and multimedia projects authored for the Web, TWI also remembers its heritage with print archives
• Print-ready and distributable, with stable URLs, ready for dossiers and classrooms
  TWI articles can be made into elegant off-prints on the fly, by any user
• Creative Commons licensing for easy dissemination
  New articles are published under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5 license
• Open source and open access via Drupal and the DrupalJournal Project
  Taking open access to the next level, with no author subventions or fees, using open source content management; interested journals and editors may collaboratively develop a DrupalJournal release, customized for most journal functions
• Community driven and authored content
  Wiki-style functionality, with version tracking, facilitates distributed editorial management and production
• Integrated blogging and commenting, with RSS feeds, news aggregator, and daily notifications
  Content stays fresh and is distributed across the Web, inviting readers back and reaching out to new ones
• Automated feeds to indexing services like ERIC
  Simplifies the process of submitting content to major indexing services, like ERIC
• Web-based management of all editorial processes
  All editorial management, including author notifications, review tracking, and production are Web-based and accessible

This handout represents the bulk of his talk, but he also discussed some of the problems with electronic publication. What really caught my interest was his explanation of the prejudice that e-journals aren't peer reviewed at all or aren't referreed as rigorously as print journals. You might have noticed that most electronic journals have on their main page a link to a "Review Process" page which gives a detailed explanation of their peer review process (e.g. this one from Into the Blogosphere -- though, it should be said, ITB is an edited collection, not a journal. Everyone gets confused about that. It's a one-time thing -- an anthology.), intended for tenure files. Do assistant professors who are up for tenure have to give this kind of apologia for print publications? Anyway, Dave emphasized the importance of publishing not only a description of the review process, but also the acceptance rate. I agree.

Dave also talked about a new distribution of Drupal called DrupalJournal, which would offer features that would be desirable for journal editors. In the Q&A, John Holbo asked with great interest when DrupalJournal would be available. It must be a very new idea, because I combed the Drupal main page and didn't see any mention of it, though if you're curious to see what's in the works for Drupal in the coming year (or could be in the works), check out Dries' predictions and the ones at Drupal.org.

Finally, Dave mentioned the efforts of the people who run the WAC Clearinghouse. It's a great resource which all of you should look through if you get a chance. Parlor Press, which Dave runs, releases books online (whole books!) at the WAC Clearinghouse site.

Kris was the respondent, and she had a lot to say about multimodal literacy and how our publication models aren't connected well with our students' literate practices. She also spoke about her experience as the editor of Computers and Composition Online, mentioning that multimodal scholarly compositions still have some problems. Some of them, she said, are much flash, little substance, or much substance, little flash in the way of engagement with the media. Achieving a balance is still a problem.

After the presentation, there were some great questions posed by Amardeep, Scott, and others. Maybe they'll reiterate those here. Or maybe I will, a little later. Overall, I think the session went well.

Though it might be tricky as I'm interviewing, I'm still going to try to blog the sessions I attend. Try to. Tonight I'm thinking about attending these:

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8. The Subject Matter of Composition

5:15-6:30 p.m. McKinley, Marriott

Program arranged by the Division on the Teaching of Writing. Presiding: Yolanda Sealey-Ruiz, Kingsborough Community College, City University of New York.

1. "Revising the Comp-Lit/Lit-Comp Debate," Deborah H. Holdstein, Northern Illinois University

2. "The Stakes in Not Staking a Claim: Why Composition Needs Its Own Content," Mary R. Boland, California State University, San Bernardino

3. "What's the Matter with Composition? Revision or Re-vision at the Two-Year College," Thomas Lawrence Long, Thomas Nelson Community College

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35. English Studies and Political Literacy

7:00–8:45 p.m., Cotillion Ballroom North, Marriott

A forum

Presiding: Donald P. Lazere, University of Tennessee, Knoxville

1. “How Can Americans under Forty Be Tuned Back In to Following the News?” David T. Z. Mindich, Saint Michael’s College

2. “Student Conservatism and Political Literacy,” Adolph L. Reed, Jr., University of Pennsylvania

3. “Political Literacy in Rhetoric and Composition Studies,” Patricia Roberts-Miller, University of Texas, Austin

4. “Reading and Political Literacy at Risk in Young Americans,” Mark Bauerlein, Emory University

5. “Learning Political Literacy through Chicago’s Public Schools: What’s College Funding Got to Do with It?” Kenneth W. Warren, University of Chicago

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Other than that, blogging will be nonexistent or light until around January 3.

New Kid, who has really outdone herself, has raised the bar for the Teaching Carnival, with the most comprehensive one yet. [NOTE: I see that all of New Kid's archives from December 10 to the present are gone all of a sudden. I'll leave the link up in the hope that the post will come back. UPDATE: This has happened at all TypePad sites. What we're seeing now at places like Frogs and Ravens, 2 Board Alley, and New Kid's blog are backup copies.]

The Happy Feminist is hosting the December Feminist Carnival, which features lots of topics such as sex, the arts, women's political representation, and women's work.

By the way, this is my 999th post. Does anyone want to suggest a topic for my 1000th? If not, it'll probably be my library story.

Edited to add, as long as I'm linking to stuff, a link to Composition Forum, which recently went from print to online with some (a lot of!) help from Bradley Dilger.