Digital Bibliography

Contents: FYC as “writing as a generalizable skill” vs. “writing as technology.” Students as with a dual existence in the U: anonymous and uniquely individual. How to reconcile that.

Whew. I’ve been on the road now for almost an entire month. I’m exhausted. And it’s got me thinking about the role patience plays in working with new media.* In this post, I’m going to try to think about it from the role of someone who produces new media scholarship.

I’m teaching at DMAC again this summer, and we’re into the home stretch with the visiting participants’ projects. We began the institute by introducing people to two software packages: Audacity and iMovie 9 (part of Apple’s iLife suite, and only available for Macs). After two days of really intense introductions to these software, and asking the participants to put together two small practice texts (which Scott and Cindy call “finger exercises”) we started to introduce participants to an emerging software package called “Sophie.” (Click here for details about the Sophie Project developing the software).

I’ll skip the sordid details, but I it’s safe to say that Sophie wasn’t yet ready for prime time. Read the rest of this entry »

In my last post, I introduced the concept of mentorship and intimacy. I’m talking about the type of intimacy that emerges from a relationship characterized by trust, honesty, risk, and safety. For both participants.

Looking back at this previous sentence, it occurs to me (“I write to know what I’m thinking”) that my own ideas of mentorship are tied to an only-one-on-one type of relationship. I’m not sure why that is. I  guess that has to do with my own ideas about intimacy and trust. Maybe I’m working on the idea that there’s some sort of continuum between teacher and mentor. And that spectrum varies according to number. For each teacher, one student or many students. If a teacher works at establishing a relationship with one student, I see that as mentorship. If several students, I see it as a classroom. But that’s over-simplified. Can a teacher be a mentor, say, to a relatively small group of students in the journalism club? Or the wrestling team? I guess so. But I have a pretty serious impulse to call that something other than mentorship. But now I feel like I’ve digressed. Back to the idea of intimacy.

So here’s the basic idea: in order for a relationship to be a mentorship to happen, there needs to be an intimacy. (Really, I’m just working through this idea as provisional, so bear with me.) There seems to me to be something “off the record” about mentorship. Read the rest of this entry »