jill/txt

I laid my bag on the table while I waited, and watched it silently mimicking the crooked crosses of letter-writers.

Yours truly, sincerely, forever, kiss kiss.

I’m going to Copenhagen, no, let me use the more affectionate Køben, this weekend, to visit Susana and Lisbeth and hopefully see Espen and Jesper and everyone else too. I’ll be bringing my camera, of course, but doubt I’ll be blogging. This is hardly an earth-shattering catastrophe; I’ll only be gone two days.

Noah’s going to be here in Bergen next week, which will be another treat. If you’re in town you’re welcome to come listen to him present his artistic work on Thursday at 10:15-12, room 264 in the HF-building behind Johanneskirken. Afterwards you might like to come and have lunch at På Høyden with all the other cool, creative netheads in town. Oh yes.

Networking on the Network: A Guide to Professional Skills for PhD Students has some very specific and sensible-sounding advice on how to become part of a research community (conferences and blogging and, especially to begin with, the luck of having a lion who’s an excellent networker for a supervisor have been my main networking tools, I realise) and even, more usefully for me right now, on how to give advice when you’ve got your first job and students are suddenly coming to you for guidance.

The link’s from Alex Halavais, who hands out a packet of such goodies to new grad students.

I photographed bits of my notes from DAC 2001 at Brown before throwing them in the recycling bin. It is amazing how you can completely forget something though you have obviously been paying attention. I rarely take such careful notes these days. Anyway, the slides and text for Stuart Moulthrop’s closing keynote are at his website, so these notes are nothing but decoration.

I tried combining written and oral discussion in today’s seminar, with mixed success. I assumed everyone had read the texts I’d asked them to (Turing, Weizenbaum, a few photocopied pages of Turkle) and started off by asking everyone to log into MoveableType and write uncritically for five minutes - associations, questions, etc about what they’d read. Then I asked them to read each other’s posts (bad idea, probably, after saying “write uncritically” - I should have let them keep their first drafts private), and comment. Then, in groups of three, start by discussing what they’d written and read and together find a statement or question with which to start a debate. All that took 45 minutes, so we had a break, then plenary discussion afterwards (a total of eleven students, it’s not a large class), where each group lead the discussion for about ten minutes each. Finally I asked them to go back and edit/rewrite their initial blog posts.

Problems:

• There wasn’t enough time for the writing. And I think I need to be a lot more specific in the tasks I give for writing. Writing in a blog is pretty daunting, I think, when you’re not used to it.

• I also need to be more specific about why they’re writing. (Practice, discussion, formulate ideas clearly, work towards their own term papers)
• I want students to use their blogs as a discussion space. That means not just writing but reading and linking. I need to calculate spending time on this, allowing them to link, quote, think, answer.
• There aren’t enough computers, so a few students wrote on paper. I made sure the three students who didn’t speak in the plenary discussion got their own computers for the final writing, but perhaps I should send some students next door to the computer lab and fetch them back after ten or fifteen minutes. That’s more disruptive though. Commenting on each others posts could be done in pairs.

Good things:

• Having a small group lead the plenary discussion was a good idea. Next time I’ll just ask one group to lead each session’s discussion, the other groups can be given some other task.

• I want to continue working on the write, discuss, rewrite approach. It didn’t quite work this time, but I think it could work, and it’s an important technique to learn, a good cycle for thinking.
• I trusted the students a lot more this week. I liked my calm. Mind you, those American drugs I was on might have had a bit to do with that, they sure don’t sell cold medication like that over the counter in Norway. The students are wonderful, though, they have plenty to say, lots of knowledge, experience, ideas. They don’t need me as a nursemaid, just as an organiser.
• I’m pleased that instead of refusing students who’ve not done the preparation entry to classroom or punishing them somehow, as has been suggested to me, I set up activities that plain aren’t fun if you’ve not prepared. Also, small groups make it so embarrassing if you’ve read nothing. And I don’t have to do or say a thing about whether they’ve read or not.

Right at the end I wrote up the four different techniques we’d used today on the board: reading (before class), writing, discussing in small groups and discussion in plenary. I asked them to think about with which of these methods they felt they’d learnt most, and to rank the top three. Each student did so and I wrote down marks to show the votes. The scores came out like this, the numbers being the number of students who ranked each activity as best, second best, etc:

I was quite surprised at how strongly the students felt that they’d learned from the plenary discussion, because I tend to worry about the students who don’t speak in plenary and to worry when the discussion goes a different direction to what I’d expected. My methodology stinks here, of course: the writing got short shift and I didn’t find ways of using it properly, students voted for “reading” because as they said without having read the texts beforehand they’d have had nothing to discuss, and most importantly, I asked “from which activity did you learn most” which is almost meaningless: learn what? Still, for something I came up with on the spur of the moment this quick evaluation worked pretty well, and was a very efficient way of getting feedback from the class about what worked today, anyway.

It’s as difficult to photograph a falling leaf as it is to catch one in your hand. Once fallen they’re easily caught.

My good friend Elin is looking for a roommate - if you know anyone in Cambridge (the one near Boston) who needs a place to live, please point them her way!

Hypertext 03 is on in Nottingham and I just remembered I could have been on the IRC channel with all the geeks with wirelessed lapt

Alex Golub is finishing an essay he’s going to submit for publication and his description of the mixture of elation and fear is wonderful, culminating thus:

My ideas quite often lack such confidence, but I love this image of ideas furiously wanting to be expressed and the writer, struggling to find out how.

After a few days of headaches, a stiff neck and sore throat my nose joined the party and forced me to admit I’m sick. So I’m home, mostly in bed, snoozing, reading and drinking Lemsip out of my favourite cup. Isn’t the cup lovely? It’s a commemorative cup given to me when I was in England the year Charles and Di were married. I was ten and it’s followed me loyally from that childhood simplicity of loving a royal, romantic televised wedding through separation, divorce, and new attempts at love. I’m not planning on early death in a car crash, though, far from it, in fact, tomorrow I plan on being better again.

Peter Carey is one of my favourite authors, and I’m obviously going to have to read his latest book: it’s based on the Ern Malley hoax, which my Great Uncle Jim was one of the instigators of. Uncle Jim wrote rather traditional poetry, you know, it rhymed and made sense, and he and a mate decided to reveal modernism as a load of nonsense by writing the complete works of the late “Ern Malley” on a Saturday afternoon and getting “Ern’s” widow sister to send them to a modernist poetry journal. The journal most gratifyingly printed them, declaring Ern a modernist genius, and it took months before the hoax was revealed. Of course the editor argued that “well, it was written by great poets so was great poetry even if meant as ridicule” while Uncle Jim and his mate claimed the entire works of Ern (or perhaps only a line or two) were copied out of a textbook on mosquitos and their habitats. Or something.

Obviously, Uncle Jim didn’t quite succeed in his noble fight against modernism. And I’m a bit worried about how he (or rather, the character inspired by Uncle Jim and his mate) is going to be portrayed in this book, too: “An arrogant young Australian poet named Christopher Chubb decides to teach his country a lesson about pretension and authenticity.” (amazon) Perhaps my concerns about truth and such are genetically determined.

“I kiss you as we’re sitting on the sofa with the computer open beside us. I lean against you, pushing you down until you’re lying beneath me with your head resting gently on the keyboard of the laptop. I lift my eyes to see letters appearing on the screen, a scattered dozen as your head first touches the keys, then more, filling in the blanks, as you turn your head to see what I’m looking at.”

“What do the letters spell?”

“I don’t know. That would depend on what this story turns out to be about.”

Seeing the world absentmindedly through the LCD screen of a digital camera you’d almost forgotten was still turned on you’re surprised by details usually unseen, views you’d never have pointed a camera at if your eye was hard against the viewfinder.

Oh my goodness. I’ve just ticked off all but one of the items on my work to-do list leaving nothing but “start prospectus for book”. You know, the book that would be based on my PhD thesis but popular while still serious enough to be taken seriously, the book that would use the bits I actually like in my thesis as foundations for the research I’m interested in now, and that would obviously be a Good Idea, but that also requires thought and planning and marketing and selling and ample opportunity for rejection. I suppose I could start preparing Thursday’s teaching instead. But now I’ve worked out the whole schedule for the semester, preparing a single class really doesn’t require two days’ work. OK. I can do anything for fifteen minutes, and I promise myself I can go home after that!