schizzes and flows

As mentioned in an earlier post, I’m in the process of moving schizzes and flows to another (and hopefully last) blog host (stay tuned for a re-directing post sometime in the next month or so). As with any move where just about everything you own needs to be held and assessed individually before ever making into a box, moving van, etc., I’m finding the change-over both exhausting and exciting. Exhausting because, well, I’m moving two years of blogging elsewhere (as a bonus though, I’m quickly becoming the world’s fastest “cut and paste” man … don’t believe me, pony up for a challenge and we’ll see). Despite the frustrations and aching fingers and back, though, I’m enjoying the fine-tooth-comb attention required for such a move. (Of course, there are the inevitable cringe moments when you re-read a post long forgotten and probably best left that way.)

Today’s mission: transfer the blogroll and catch up on what I haven’t had time to read in the past few weeks. As I started shifting names and links, however, two things occurred to me: 1) I’m linking more people than I can possibly read in a week (though I’m not convinced this is necessarily a bad thing), and 2) Despite #1, I should be reading more often because there’s a lot of great writing and thinking going on out there by some really smart and engaging personalities. I’m sure I’m not alone when I confess that my blog reading follows fairly habitual patterns, where I move through a set of practiced links that are almost always the same and almost always in the same order. Again, I’m not sure there’s anything bad or shameful about this–when faced with so much information and possible points of connection, we’re bound to simplify, even if that means ignoring the richly complex in favor of the richly simplistic. Still, with so much excellent work out there in the blogosphere, I want to (and am excited to) recommit myself to these blogs and bloggers, in effect to resist the comforts of routine and the trappings of familiarity (how’s that for melodrama and hyperbole?)

I apologize to any out there who’ve had trouble posting comments. As first, the problem was limited to a moderation setting–that is, I turned off the option that would require me to approve a comment before it can be posted, but apparently that was just some Fisher Price option (looks like it works, but really just for show). Solution: moderate the comments and act as though I actually have some agency…

A nuisance to be sure, but no some are even being denied the capacity to post comments altogether–in some cases, even being barred permanently from commenting on ole schizzes and flows. As you might imagine, I’m pretty pissed about this. I really appreciate and value the comments I receive here (I mean, that’s an integral part of blogging, right?).

Of course, I’ve tried to get help from Blogsome, but so far no one’s stepped up to offer up a solution to this problem. I made the move to Blogsome some time ago because of similar frustrations with Blogger. And for the most part, I was/am happy here. If this issue doesn’t get settled, though, I’ll once again (sigh) have to move operations elsewhere…

Since I posted a while back about the upcoming changes to UW’s CompRhet website, I wanted to pass along the revised (and newly uploaded) product. Major props to Rick for putting this together and for gracefully listening and responding to the (often competing) interests and concerns raised over the past few months. We still have some work to do here (namely, cornering some people with a digital camera..!), but for the most part I feel the new site is a step up and in the right direction for this program.

Band practice: The first of many (I hope) weekly jam sessions: readin’, discussin’, riffin’, and rockin’ theory and its place in rhet-comp. First up: D&G’s A Thousand Plateaus. This is why I went to grad school…

Radiohead’s official website: writing rhizomes

Learning (ok, tinkering with) Flash: after 8 hours, finally some very basic animations (though not visible in Explorer). The first step to a new writing project…

Reading Richard Doyle’s Wetwares: Experiments in Postvital Living: becoming-animal: “Cultivating a familiar requires a certain touch. A friendship of great rigor, it offers not fusion but transduction, as familiar and friend acquire a common surface, each attempting to burrow into the other . . . Through repetition–stroke, stroke, stroke–skin and fur become a multiplicity–neither human nor animal, but an ecstatic smearing of both.”

Later today: A lecture by Jose Muñoz: “The Vulnerability Artist: Latina Performativity and Affect”

Today my FYW section received a nice, user-friendly introduction to the UW libraries and the ins and outs of research in the academy. Usually this is one of the most productive and successful classes of the semester, though I’m not sure if this says more about the quality people employed by the UW libraries or about my own shortcomings as a teacher, but anyway.

Today, though, I found myself a resistant listener as the research librarian walked my class through the apparently hard and fast line separating the free web from the scholarly/academic/better-pay-for-your-learnin’ web. The point, of course, is helping students learn how to evaluate sources, and (less directly) how to choose appropriate sources for your intended audience. A simple google search for Hurricane Katrina, we’re rightly told, finds little in the way of “scholarly” sources–lots of news, charitable, and government sites but nothing from Author, PhD. In fact, one of the handouts the library produces for FY students succinctly breaks down the differences between scholarly and popular sources, noting at one point that scholarly sources are more likely to have an Author than popular sources. This sounds right to me, but such easy distinctions concern me, particularly this semester when much of the writing and learning we’re doing is “free” and web-based.

That said we should always be (and I think always are) evaluating information, especially when we’re on the web. But to state matter of factly that there’s little scholarly material to be found on the web seems at best to miss the point and at worse to perpetuate an image of scholarship in which the only legitimate participants are those credentialed by the very system that (re)produces qualified participants. Of course our students need to know that Wikipedia is Authored by people who may be biased and who may not have read the most recent scholarly articles, but we must be careful about how we present these differences to students or risk leaving them the impression that web-based writing doesn’t matter, at least in the court of academic opinion. While this latter point may be true for some in the uni-versity, I worry that such “helpful” advice unnecessarily challenges web-based writing and, at least in my class, student-writers who are just beginning to get a taste of their voices on the web and are, understandably, tentative and uncertain.

In any event, sounds like we have several interesting class discussions on the horizon…

Several of us at UW are attempting to remodel and update the comp-rhet program website (to replace the one where the nav bar achieves unprecedented agency as it floats freely around the screen as users move from one page to the next…Yeah.) At any rate, we’re trying to take into account the various uses program sites have and can have, though admittedly we’re designing this one with prospective and current students most in mind.

So for those of you who recently (or not so recently) toured various rhet-comp program sites around the country, what did you like? What didn’t you like? As a prospective student, what information do you most want to find on a program’s website (particuarly one that’s part of a larger English department)? What about design and navigation? Are some styles better (that is, more accessible) than others?

Any comments or suggestions would be greatly appreciated.