Here is my URL.

http://complabs.nevada.edu/~altman

Hopefully the links still work.

My dear readers,

Website Reflection

Making a website, like so much of ENG 701, was a new experience for me. I’ve not been asked to build a site before. It was frustrating to say the least. But nothing good ever came easy. At first, I tried checking every free hosting service I could think of, including 50webs. Unfortunately, both my home and office computers are dinosaurs that can hardly run anything. So I ended up making my site through UNLV OIT.

I am glad for what I’ve learned. At least I now know how to edit pages in MS Word. Also, I’ve learned that you have to edit and link every little individual page. That makes sense, it just was irritating because I more than once forgot to make those said links, thereby driving myself loony. I was glad to know that at least I already knew how to change the background colors. Though I ultimately went with grey to be not so tacky.

The text was easy enough to do through MS Word, since I use Word every day just about. I was glad I could cut and paste the text I had already made previously. Call me nuts but to me the text seems to me the point of a site. I mean pictures are nice but my text is what I wanted to convey.
As far as the text I wrote, I started off with information about me including my goals and research interests. I love poetry and want to teach it someday. I also have a page detailing my albeit limited teaching experience. I wish I really could find a way to show through the website how much I love my job. My Interests page combines with my Teaching page to detail what I want to do academically in the future. Also, I posted my admittedly slim Vita, which I will strive to expand in the future.

Anyway, I enjoyed making the site. This was my first stab at a site. This activity showed me how complicated web design can be. I never would have thought that parts of a site did not kind of “hook” together automatically. Hopefully, I’ll remember for next time. I now understand how important the internet is for self promotion and relaying information both about me and the world at large.
I think Sullivan’s “Taking Control of the Page: Electronic Writing and Word Publishing.” Is relevant to what I did due to the increasing use of web based methods for teaching. I also think that McGee’s article “The Politics of the Program: MS Word as the Invisible Grammarian” was also useful since I used MS Word to help with the site. I can see that MS Word’s grammar checker can potentially affect the way things are phrased on a site made with Word.

Freire tells us that we as educators make ideological choices in everything we do. That makes me stop and consider what am I saying ideologically through my new site without realizing it? I certainly hope I haven’t made myself seem anti-visual by not having pictures on my site. I love pictures. I just did not want to stick pictures on there just to have pictures. Every part of a site should serve a purpose.

Thank you so much for your time,

James Altman

Number 13: for the week of April 29, 2010

My dear readers,

The main problem at play in this week's readings is the idea of writing assessment. How should writing quality be assessed? As with most issues dealing with composition there are a number of different viewpoints. Huot in his article "Toward a New Theory of Writing Assessment” contends that in order for multiple-choice tests to have become as prevalent in assessing writing as they have, instructors must have put a great deal of faith in the testing technology. Well, that sounds to me like the same sort of thing McGee talks about with Microsoft Word and the “Invisible Grammarian”. Both cases involve people we possibly unfounded trust in a technology which may not be reliable. What I mean is, Microsoft Word’s grammar checker is not always correct. Unfortunately, my students think it is infallible, leading to numerous corrections on their papers that they are not expecting. If one piece of technology has limitations, why should we assume another does not? I understand the desire to take subjectivity out of the equation, but are multiple-choice assessments which are still subjective, owing to the fact that the person writing the exam will privilege what they feel is most important and ignore everything else really the best answer?

Huot in his other article for this week "The Literature of Direct Writing Assessment” discusses the three major ways correctly in use for assessing writing, namely, single trait, analytic, and holistic. Single trait, is just what it sounds like in that one facet of the piece of writing in question is considered above all others, its quality or lack thereof is the total basis for assessment, such as grammatical correctness. Analytic takes a couple of factors, such as grammatical correctness, and persuasiveness into account. Holistic grading, which I use, take everything into account. Of course, not everyone feels that way.

Edward White's article "An Apologia for the Timed Impromptu Essay Test” reminds us that "for most of our colleagues outside the English department and for almost all administrators, assessment means multiple-choice testing; evaluation of actual writing, whether on impromptu essay tests, term papers, or portfolios, is still generally seen as hopelessly subjective, unreliable, and arbitrary." While I argue a lot of the supposed subjectivity could be removed by more clearly defined rubrics, I can see the point from their point of view.

In his other article for this week, "The Scoring of Writing Portfolios” White makes a claim which I think is a nice wish. He says “one particular strength of portfolio assessment is its capacity to include reflection about the portfolio contents by the students submitting portfolios”. My senior year of high school, Lyon County school district instituted mandatory portfolios as a requirement for graduation beginning with that year’s seniors. To be blunt, nobody in my school had a clue in hell how to handle the new requirement. Yerington High School had never used portfolios before. So the administration improvised. No reflection went into the portfolio I submitted for graduation, at least no reflection from me. Every item in it was selected by one or more of my teachers, most of them without ever asking me if I wanted that specific item in my portfolio or not. Honestly, about one quarter of what was in my graduation portfolio, was entirely a mystery to me until about 20 minutes before my final presentation for graduation… why? Because the teachers advising me at not made up their minds when the last few items should be until that moment. And for those of you wondering how our portfolios were assessed, well, we got up in front of the school board members, talked for about 15 minutes each, were told "great job on your portfolio" and then told to quickly exit in order to make way for the next graduate. I declare to this day I still don't fully understand why most of the things that went in my portfolio were there at all.

As you might suspect I'm pretty sour on portfolios, but that's only because I still don't really understand the point of doing them, and the article really did not clear anything up for me. I'm much more enjoyed “Constructs of writing proficiency in US state and national writing assessments: Exploring variability”. Just thinking about the variability in exams and standards across the country drives home to me the idea that no matter what anyone may say there is not one single way for judging good writing, therefore, those who think that writing is a simple skill that can be mastered one way in the lower grades are off base.

I also enjoyed "Directed Self-Placement” by Royer and Gilles because to me it showed Peter Elbow's idea of letting students have a strong voice in directing their own learning. After all, Elbow students will be more engaged and ultimately perform better if you let them choose their tasks. Well, it is the next logical step from choosing writing tasks, to choosing a writing class. Also, Royer and Gilles make the point that many universities only place students the way they do as a means toward efficiency. They make the point that students, ideally, know the strengths and weaknesses of their writing the best. That is a point with which I think Elbow would agree, and so do I. Mind you, I was a little surprised that only 22% of students placed themselves in the lower writing class. Unfortunately that could show a weakness in the system into maybe not every student is either as knowledgeable about their own writing ability or as honest with themselves about it.

Overall, I found the explanation for the addition of a timed essay portion to the SAT satisfactory. I think that combining multiple-choice and essay format on the same test will give students and administrators alike a better idea of the ability of each individual.

Thank you so much for your time,

James Altman

Number 12: for the week of April 15, 2010

My dear readers,

The main overarching issue with that I see in this week's articles is the concept of ideology. What is it? How is it expressed? What role, if any, does it or should it play in the composition classroom of the new millennium? In her article "diversity, ideology, and teaching writing" Maxine Hairston, appears to make the claim, unless I am missing something, that ideology has no place in the composition classroom. Indeed I would argue she sees no room in the composition classroom for anything other than what we might think of as strict composition, that is grammatical considerations and just simply trying to figure out what it means to write.

Okay, I can see where she gets that since composition studies is a new discipline and she's trying to show it as separate from literary studies. However I think she goes too far. As I stated earlier in one of my previous blog entries I am an outer directed theorist as defined by Bizzell. In other words, I believe that nothing happens in a vacuum. However, according to Hairston apparently composition studies takes place in a bubble where nothing else has any business being at any time. Well, forgive me for saying so but that sounds to me like guarding the tower the first and most academically shortsighted stage of "diving in" by Mina Shaughnessy. All right, Madam Hairston so you don't want the writing class to be all about politics, eh? Fine neither do I to be honest with you. But in the same breath, you also don't want it to have anything to do with literature.

Again, fine. Remember though, that as Peter Elbow points out in his article, “reflections on academic discourse: how it relates to freshman colleagues" having students just write what they are comfortable with isn't necessarily productive either. Besides, even if students only write about their own experiences, all of those experiences are still going to be influenced by the world around them, which is itself literally dripping in ideology of one form or another because the people in it have ideological beliefs whether they realize them or not.

As Berlin points out a rhetoric can never be neutral or just an arbiter of cultural disputes because it is built by people that have a stake in those disputes. Show me one person who can truly be neutral on a topic about which they care passionately. I do not think you can do it. Nor would I expect you to be able to. Freire correctly points out that "all educational practice implies a theoretical stance on the educator’s part”. In other words, even by asking my students to call me "professor Altman" as opposed to "James" I am making the choice. I make the choice in this case because that is what I am used to, and more importantly that is what I believe is proper for an educator at any level. Why do I say this? Why am I uncomfortable with my students calling me by my first name? Simply put, I cannot recall ever taking a class where a teacher said for instance "call me Jack". In 1980s East Texas, and suburban Los Angeles, that just wasn't done. In fact, the one kid I saw try it got his face slapped. That was still legal in those days.

More importantly, my family taught me that to call a teacher Mr. or Ms. or professor or Doctor. was not simply good manners but was an acknowledgment of the hard road they had to travel to get to the point to where they had enough knowledge to be able to teach little old me. To call them by their first name would be to disregard everything that they had gone through and to try to place myself on an equal footing with them to which I was not entitled. Now did that mean all my teachers were aloof? Certainly not, but they all maintained the sort of respectful distance which I now try to maintain. It is the same thing when I open my blog entries with "my dear readers" I'm not trying to be pompous or anything, it just seems to me that that is the way for one to properly open this type of correspondence. Yes, as I see it a blog is a form of correspondence I treat it no differently than the letters I send my family, the only difference is this letter can be seen by anybody with a computer so I have to watch what I say language wise a little bit more than if I was back home in the Sierra.

Like I said earlier everything has to do with ideology whether we realize it or not, and that isn't always a bad thing. After all, everything has to have a point or why bother doing it. Shor, takes Freire’s ideas and begins to apply them to a real American classroom. I must admit that was the one thing I found missing when I first read Freire’s masterstroke "pedagogy of the oppressed" for English 791 with Stephen Brown as a master’s student. I loved the book and still do reread periodically but I remember complaining more than once that I needed to see how it would work in industrialized America as opposed to the Third World. Dr. Brown, as all good educators will, used my complaint, as a springboard to stir me to action saying that in fact I should not simply whine about a lack of example but should create that example in my own teaching. Thus I have strived to do ever since.

Mind you, I wonder how many people do especially after reading "students’ goals, gatekeeping, and some questions of ethics" by Jeff Smith. Gatekeeping in its traditional exclusionary sense makes me queasy, as it does Smith. I understand that standards must be set in any profession or endeavor. That is a sort of quality control measures, if you like. It ensures that persons within a profession actually know how to do what they claim they can do. I'm all for that. The problem is gatekeeping is more often used to keep out those who might challenge or change outdated practices, or more generally cause headaches for the elite by reminding them that not everyone is elite. In this respect, I'm reminded not only of Mike Rose and his ideas that rhetoric can be exclusionary, but also of "Inventing the University". Recall that in that article we were faced with the theory that every student in every class must relearn or learn to begin with how to communicate within academic discourses. Those who were able to do so more fluently we call successful, those who struggled we call below average or any one of 100 things rose brings up as possible reasons why people are excluded from opportunities in every walk of life. At the core of all that is the idea that every system of gatekeeping because it is created by human beings who are influenced by ideology will itself contain an ideological slant which would favor some at the expense of others. While I grant you no system is perfect, do we not owe it to those whom we teach to at least understand and come to terms with the ideological harnesses with which we either hoist them up into the Academy or cast them down into the "real world"?

Thank you so much for your time,

James Altman

Dr. Jablonski,

I posted my revised proposal to my blog and also emailed it to you. I intend to submit an electronic copy in the Webcampus assignment section except I don't see a place to do so. Every place I try just lets me VIEW my OLD proposal not SUBMIT my NEW one. What am I doing wrong?

Thank you so much for your time,

James Altman

Here's a revised proposal...enjoy.

Title: Taming the dragon: effective use of Dragon NaturallySpeaking speech
recognition software.

Scholars in computers and writing have studied how such applications as word processing software affect the writing process. One under-examined area, however, is software applications that aid students with disabilities. Feng and Sears in their article “interaction techniques for users with spinal cord injuries: a speech-based solution”, make what I take to be eye-opening claims about the voice recognition software Dragon NaturallySpeaking. They claim seven out of every eight initial users eventually abandon the program in short order, due to slow rate of production (17 to 20 words per minute, as opposed to 30 words per minute typing by hand, or 120 to
150 words per minute in casual conversation). Moreover, they claim that upwards
of 75% of an individual user's time is spent simply in correcting recognition
errors. Moreover, other issues such as the need for privacy during dictation
can also lead to abandonment of the program by inexperienced users according to
Wobbrock and Myers. I do not deny any of this. Moreover, I am an experienced user of Dragon NaturallySpeaking software having used five of its ten versions so far.

Voice recognition software is not a miracle worker. However, it is my intention to show that with the proper expectations, Dragon NaturallySpeaking can be a boon to those who are willing to employ it. I do not intend to be exclusionary in this piece. I intend to show through research and my own experiences how Dragon NaturallySpeaking software can be used as a tool of universal access not only for the physically disabled like myself, but for everyone with a passion for writing. Through this paper, I will be able to show many able-bodied persons, who might never think of using voice recognition software, the benefits of attempting it in their daily lives. I intend to show through scholarly research and my own experience what I believe are the proper techniques for employing Dragon NaturallySpeaking software most effectively including methods of training the device including employing training texts which users are encouraged to read into Dragon when beginning using the program but many users do not do leading to needlessly poor speech recognition. Learning to avoid pitfalls with Dragon will help to avoid many of the speech recognition errors which often frustrate beginning users especially those who are used to typing by hand.

Therefore, my audience is not simply physically disabled students like myself
but anyone involved in English composition or the other humanities in which
frequent writing is a necessity. In particular I believe special education teachers will find my work most useful as they try to integrate new technologies into their classrooms in order to help students express themselves who might otherwise be unable to do so. Moreover, I believe the teachers of composition at the 101 and 102 level will also find my analysis useful as they increasingly find themselves both dealing with a diverse student population and with less time in which to grade papers and provide feedback to students. I believe voice recognition software like Dragon NaturallySpeaking can be a great assistance in all these areas. When properly acclimated to voice recognition software anyone who loves to do or is required to do a great deal of writing will eventually find it a great aid in what they are doing.

Number 11: for the week of April 8, 2010

My dear readers,

The main topic at issue in this week's readings is the idea of how to teach writing. Which of the myriad of competing theories is best? Is there one theory so pedagogically sound that it would completely cover every conceivable writing situation for every conceivable student? In fact, can writing even be taught?

First of all, let me go ahead and say that I believe writing can be taught. I have run across few things in life that cannot be taught. How to teach it, now that's the kicker. Personally, I do not believe that there is one single theory of "proper" writing pedagogy. Writing is an activity that expresses itself so many different ways in so many different genres that it seems to me both simplistic and more than a little arrogant to say that any single theory is so supreme that all others should be done away with. I ask you, show me one area of life where that is the case. I'll wager you cannot do it, because no area of life is as clear cut as all that.

"Post process pedagogy: a philosophical exercise" deals with that same idea. It considers whether writing can even be taught, and after coming to the conclusion that it can advocates attempting and even mixing a variety of approaches. When I had said in class that the writing process is "whatever works" that is essentially what I mean. In other words, one size does not fit all students. Mind you, I do believe that it is possible and likely for each individual student to find a writing process that works for them. Moreover, once they find it I think they should stick to it unless it stops providing satisfying results and personal fulfillment which I see as two of writings main goals. This is part of the reason why at the start of every paper writing cycle, I give my English 102 students one "drafting day". When they come in on those days, they are free to use any generative process they choose: outlining, concept mapping, clustering, or anything else they can think of. Nearly all of my students, by their own admission, have never yet been given the freedom to explore the writing process and find out what works for them. They've always just been force-fed someone else's prescriptive program. I believe I mentioned earlier in the semester about the girl who asked me if I required a concept map with the first paper. See, that's what I mean most students don't see things like concept mapping as tools to help them in the writing process. Instead they see them as one more hoop they have to jump through to keep the professor from breathing fire down their neck. I never want my students to have to feel like they have to do things exactly the way I do them if that is not what works best for them.

In his article "contemporary composition: the major pedagogical theories" Berlin has it right when he says that we are teaching a view of reality when we are teaching writing. That is completely true because writing involves generating, assimilating and then communicating notions about the world. Even if we don't want to go that far we could say that we are teaching a view of what writing and academia are every time we teach writing. That is because what we as individual writing teachers choose to emphasize or leave out of our teaching will on some level shape the students that emerge from our classes. I do not think that this is done maliciously. I simply think that each writing teacher is using the skills and examples they have built up over a lifetime. Parker J. Palmer in The Courage to Teach says the teachers must teach from who they are. That is why I teach writing using not only literary and composition examples but also examples from history, sports, and even Saturday morning cartoons. I teach this way because that is who I am. Whatever your method, or philosophical slant if you show your students you genuinely believe in the "bill of goods" you are "selling them" they usually respond well in my albeit limited experience. I also enjoyed the idea of Berlin talking about teaching writing in terms of a view of reality because it made me think of his earlier article about current traditional rhetoric and how constrained and formulaic most of that is.

I like the idea Downs proposes in his article about renaming and re-envisioning first-year composition as introduction to writing studies. If we did that, maybe more students would be able to learn about writing is about effective communication and self-expression not just red ink on paper, letter grades, and sleepless nights. Maybe then we could teach students about the principles behind rhetoric and how to be persuasive without them worrying about the next hoop they have to jump through grade wise. Mind you, I can see how it would be difficult to get something like that off the ground since most people outside of composition only care about visible results like the number of typos in a paper.

Along those same lines one particular point mentioned in Fulkerson's article "composition at the turn of the 21st century" particularly strikes me. That is the idea that many teachers try on some level to prepare their students for "the" academic discourse community… yeah, like there is only one. Are you kidding? There are dozens at least. Every department of every college qualifies as one. Every discipline from engineering to theater needs and wants different things out of its writers. Add to that the fact that every composition classroom is slightly different because no two instructors are identical and you may get the impression, as I do, that the most of composition teacher can do most of the time is to give his or her students experience with as many different types of writing as the constraints of the composition class will allow. Of course it is difficult to do this in many cases because most composition students are so new to the college environment they haven't a clue what academic discipline or discourse community they want to have anything to do with. Therefore, while I as a composition teacher might hopefully expose them at some point to types of writing they will eventually have to do in their chosen majors they will invariably see any other kind of writing that I show them as worthless. Indeed, if they don't have a major yet they might see every kind of writing I show them as worthless for anything other than a grade on a transcript. I've got to be honest, no one ever had to explain the value of writing to me. When you are as physically isolated as I have been at many points in my life you quickly learn to make full use of any tool you can find that helps connect you to others.

I have to admit of all the articles for this week "what works in teaching composition" was the least understandable to me and therefore the least helpful. On a different note, the fact that they found so many different theories present in the studies they examined testifies to the state of flux characterizing this type of pedagogy.

Thank you so much for your time,

James Altman

Number 10: for the week of March 25, 2010

My dear readers,

Generally speaking, the theme of this week's articles is computers in education. More specifically, however, they deal with what difference can computers make in a classroom and who gets to decide. I have enjoyed most of the articles we have read this semester. That being said, this week's offerings are, by and large, some of my favorites. That is because unlike some of the subjects we have talked about, like feminist theory, computers in education is a subject I deal with every day. Just for reference this entry which you are reading was constructed from the very start on a computer using software which transcribes my voice directly into Microsoft Word or any other similar program I choose.
Mind you, in that regard I am one of the lucky ones as I shall explain.
"On divides and interfaces" mentions, among other things, statistics of which I was completely unaware. I had not realized that barely one out of five persons with a disability had regular access to computers and the Internet of the kind which I enjoy.

Mind you, not that I haven't experienced that. My hometown, Yerington Nevada, was not only stuck out in the middle of godforsaken nowhere but was also, on the whole, exceedingly poor, and constantly strapped for cash even in the best of times. I don't know what it was like technology wise for those who graduated as part of the class of ‘98 here in the Las Vegas area, but I imagine they had it better than we did. Most of our teachers still did their attendance on carbon paper. That was also how I got any class notes. Virtually everything was done with paper and pencil. That meant I had to stay after school many more days than the average person just simply to get my schoolwork done. It got to the point where my teachers finally agreed to start giving me oral exams. (Thank God for that).

You could count on one hand the number of computers in our school outside of either the administrative offices (which had like two in each) or our one single computer classroom (which had 14 or 15, no more than about eight of which ever worked at any one time). I still remember how to run a computer through MS-DOS (how pitiful is that?) Oh, and if you're wondering why I didn't just use my computer at home it's because I didn't own one. We could not afford one and could not convince any state agency to help us pay for one at the time. I wrote all my papers throughout junior high and high school on a half worn out electric typewriter. Sometimes I wonder how I ever made it this far.

Of course, it is not only the disabled who often lack access to necessary technology but any minority or underprivileged group. Here we see a connection to Rose's ideas about society labeling those who don't fit the mainstream ideal as deficient. Nearly every one of my high school classmates was told upon graduation about just how much they would have to struggle to succeed in college because of what Yerington could not afford to provide for them. The Internet can be a wonderful vehicle for sharing and disseminating ideas but not if you never encounter it. That's the point of the article fewer people encounter this supposedly universal communication technology than the average person might believe.

I like the idea in Harris' article of socially constructed meaning and that each person must reach out to other communicators, by means, in this case, of computers and the Internet. The mentioning of the social constructionist thought is appropriate because if anything in life is constructed in a vacuum that something is not constructed online. Anyone roaming through cyberspace, could conceivably read this entry I am composing right now and comment on it. That hypothetical comment could lead me to post something else, and so on and so on and on. That's where scaffolding comes in I think one thing builds off of another. No, in this case were not talking about specific skills, but, still, ideas building off one another are just as important.

The notion of building and shaping ideas also comes through in McGee's article about Microsoft Word as a sort of surrogate English teacher. I must admit I see it everyday in almost everything I write. If I accidentally use the wrong word or leave a sentence fragment it lets me know. Mind you, I sometimes wonder who programmed the damn thing because some of the grammatical suggestions it makes just blow my mind. For instance, almost every time I put down "are you okay with this?" Microsoft Word wants to change "are" to "is". I guess I can see where something like spell or grammar check might make the traditional English teacher feel threatened, however if students are able to pick up even a little basic grammar from something like that isn't that a good thing? Actually, since I've started using voice transcription software I've realized I don't have to worry much about my spelling anymore. This is because the program either gets the word right and spells it correctly or just simply puts down the wrong word entirely and then I correct it by selecting the proper word. I must admit I liked that feature from the first moment I saw it. I've never been a very good speller.

Mind you I will admit I have learned how to spell certain words simply by seeing them come up on the screen over and over and over again. While I enjoyed Mueller's article, I have to admit I don't really get the difference between backchannel and underlife. I mean I get the point about things like instant messaging potentially being a distraction and that they fit into backchannel, if I'm reading the article correctly, but I don't get what all the extra fuss is about. As the article points out before computerized instant messaging people just passed notes or whispered to each other. Hell that's what we used to do. Whether hand written or electronic it simply up to the teacher to try to set a tone in his or her classroom where such things are minimized even if they can't be stopped.

I have often seen firsthand what Sullivan talks about in "Taking Control of the Page" when she says that not all teachers of writing have embraced the computer in a way that perhaps would be more beneficial to them. I agree with the explanation she gives. As I think about it, I'm not sure why you wouldn't embrace the computer and related technologies to teach writing (of course I say that, knowing that I have to embrace such technology in order to teach writing whether I want to do so or not). Maybe some people just aren't comfortable teaching with a tool that was not really around when they were beginning their education. In other words, maybe they think "well I did fine without the computer, why can't they?" Maybe some people just love the idea of writing all over papers in red pen or pencil. I have even heard of professors who will not use computers in their classrooms because they say the typing is too loud. To that, I say either invest in the kind of voice recognition software I use or wear earmuffs. I had a student asked me last semester, why it was that more professors would not accept papers submitted over with campus but instead continued to insist on having students print out several copies of every final draft. I didn't know what to tell her then and I still don't now. The only thing I can think of is maybe those teachers are so used to the old Harvard model and current traditional rhetoric, in other words, the old way of doing things whatever form it takes that they just can't break away.
Thank you so much for your time,

James Altman

Dr. Jablonski,

Here is my paper proposal, such as it is.

Title: Taming the dragon: effective use of Dragon NaturallySpeaking speech
recognition software.

Feng and Sears in their informative article “interaction techniques for users
with spinal cord injuries: a speech-based solution, make what I take to be
eye-opening claims about the voice recognition software Dragon
NaturallySpeaking. They claim seven out of every eight initial users eventually
abandon the program in short order, due to slow rate of production (17 to 20
words per minute, as opposed to 30 words per minute typing by hand, or 120 to
150 words per minute in casual conversation. Moreover, they claim that upwards
of 75% of an individual user's time is spent simply in correcting recognition
errors. Moreover, other issues such as the need for privacy during dictation
can also lead to abandonment the program by inexperienced users according to
Wobbrock and Myers.

I do not deny any of this. Moreover, I freely admit I am an experienced user of
Dragon NaturallySpeaking software having used five of its ten versions so far.
Voice recognition software is not a miracle worker. However, it is my intention
to show that with the proper expectations, Dragon NaturallySpeaking can be a
boon to those who are willing to employ it. I intend to show through scholarly
research and my own experience what I believe are the proper techniques for
employing Dragon NaturallySpeaking software most effectively including methods
of training the device including employing training texts which users are
encouraged to read into dragon when beginning using the program but many do not
leading to needlessly poor speech recognition. Moreover speaking in a
recognizable tone, that is to say learning when to employ pitfalls the device
will help to avoid speech recognition errors which often frustrate beginning
users especially those who are used to typing by hand.

I do not intend to be exclusionary in this piece. Far from it, I intend to show
through research and my own experiences how Dragon NaturallySpeaking software
can be used as a tool of universal access not only for the physically disabled
like myself but for everyone with a passion for writing. I believe from this
paper I will be able to show many able-bodied persons who might never think of
using voice recognition software the benefits of attempting it in their daily
lives.

Therefore, my audience is not simply physically disabled students like myself
but anyone involved in English composition or the other humanities in which
frequent writing is a necessity. In particular I believe special education
teachers will find my work most useful as they try to integrate new
technologies into their classrooms in order to help students expressed
themselves who might otherwise be unable to do so. Moreover, I believe the
teachers of composition at the 101 and 102 level will also find my analysis
useful as they increasingly find themselves both dealing with a diverse student
population and with less time in which to grade papers and provide feedback to
students. I believe voice recognition software like Dragon NaturallySpeaking
can be a great assistance in all these areas. I believe when properly
acclimated to voice recognition software anyone who loves to do for his
required to do a great deal of writing will eventually find it a great aid in
what they are doing.

I am giving you this now because I do not know if I will be in class this
Thursday. I have begun experiencing the same types of headaches that led to my
hospitalization at the beginning of the semester, only they are worse than
before. I do not know for certain if I will wind up having to have surgery
again but it is looking more and more likely. It is all I can do to concentrate
long enough to type out this proposal and e-mail to you. I intend to post my
blog entry for this week right now before I forget. Again, here is my proposal,
hopefully it is good enough, because right now I do not have the strength to
produce another. With any luck I will be healthy enough to see you at our first
class meeting after spring break.

Thank you for your time,

James Altman

Number 9: for the week of March 18, 2010

My dear readers,

The main theme I see running through this week’s readings is the question of what is literacy? What does it involve? Who has it? How do we measure who has it? Most importantly, who gets to make that determination?

By its very title "sponsors of literacy" gives a name to the persons and/or entities who exert the most power over what literacy has meant or will mean. I deeply enjoyed Brandt’s historical overview of the printing and publishing process. She is right when she says that by the arrival of mechanized steam powered printing you had an entire class of society which had previously had pretty much unfettered access to the composition and dissemination of knowledge who were now cut off. It seems to me, that it was not just the printer’s apprentices she refers to that suffered in the evolution of the process. The eventual consolidation of ever larger newspapers not to mention conglomerates, like Random House and Turner Broadcasting, means that an ever smaller percentage of the population is deciding what the rest of us see and think about. Though it doesn't have to do with big media I do like Brandt's example of parents demanding reading and math instruction be taught in some Sunday schools along with religious and moral training. That is the point, when you are an entity, however large, that is providing resources by which others can become literate you are able to set the terms of what must be done in order to acquire said literacy.

"The public intellectual servant" picks up on this idea. The article believes that intellectuals must turn their eyes outside of the safety of academia and try to focus their research on the problems of the real world. When the article talks about intellectuals serving underprivileged neighborhoods, I wonder if the late Hal Rothman would qualify? I don't know much about the man but he was certainly an intellectual whom I saw on television and giving lectures many times before he died. The article is correct that someone underprivileged in any way normally is not thought about very much in academia. If they are thought of it all, they are usually thought of as deficient. When Mike Rose talks about the language of exclusion he makes the same kind of point, namely, if you don't fit in a nice little window that intellectuals can easily wrap their minds around then you don't count.

"Inventing the University" brings up the same type of idea in its assertions that students must learn to fit in. In other words to be middle-class intellectuals throughout the writing they do at the university level in order to succeed. "A stranger in strange lands" talks about the same idea. This is particularly true when the student who is the subject of the case study talks about having to figure out what the teacher wants and likes and the difficulty that is often inherent in trying to do so. Unfortunately, students feel like they have to figure out what the teacher likes or believes about a subject and then spoon feed it back to them.

That's mostly true I have to admit. One of the things my mother first told me when I was in perhaps the second or third grade has stuck with me ever since. It was on a day when the teacher and I disagreed about a particular subject (I don't recall what it was) and I ended up receiving a lower grade presumably because the teacher favored her own opinion. When I brought home that bad test paper my mother told me (as she has periodically throughout my life ever since whenever a similar situation has come up) “James, if the teachers say ‘the sky is red’, and make clear to you that the only answer they will accept to the question ‘what color is the sky?’ is ‘red’, and you want a good grade, you had damn well better say ‘the sky is red’ even if you have piles of evidence to the contrary.” I have never forgotten that and it has helped me survive more courses than I care to remember. All the same in my own teaching I have tried to make clear to my students that they do not need to please me in order to get a good grade. This is because I know how stomach churning it was in many cases for me to have to write to please teachers and professors with whom I profoundly disagreed. But, I did what I had to do to fit in.

Of course, not every means of fitting into the university actually involves writing something down. As Heath points out in her article many times people assent orally to information they haven't actually read themselves but which instead has been read to them. When one of my students volunteers to read a short poem or passage from a novel to the rest of the class as part of our daily writing activities can I guarantee that every student either is reading along or has previously read what they are hearing? No I cannot I have to judge by their ascension, in this case, their participation, or lack thereof, in the discussion directly following the oral presentation. Many times in life we can gain information that is written down somewhere in some form by hearing someone else who has read it talk about it. Status reports or summaries presented to a group or an important part of many professions. (I'm including conference type presentations as well).

Hull’s article kind of takes us back to discussions we've had in previous weeks about the idea that students can't write or that they lack literacy. Well, as we discussed there are different kinds and levels of literacy and writing ability. A person who flourishes in one arena or type of class, say mathematics, may struggle in English. Is that person inherently stupid? Some apparently would say yes but I say no. I'm a firm believer in the idea of multiple intelligences. Mind you, mine is mostly verbal. That's why I chose the line of work I did, but not everyone is that way. Mind you, when teachers or employers say there is a lack of literacy what they are really saying is that many of the people they are encountering had not been trained to write or think in the fashion that they particularly privilege. That may give you an example. My late grandfather was to my knowledge entirely illiterate. I mean the man could not read. But he could feed an army with the knowledge about farming and fishing and hunting he had in only his little finger. He raised four healthy children, one of whom is my mother, yet by the standards of our educational system he was a complete failure. I can't put my finger on it but there's something about that that bothers me.

Moreover, I also enjoyed the little interview that begins Hull's article where the two girls discuss whether literacy is needed in order to be a bank teller. They're very disagreement comes from the fact they don't really know how to define literacy to begin with. My second semester teaching English 101 I had a group of about three or four students who from the very first day of class told me flat out that they did not believe writing skill was necessary for any major except English. When I challenged them to show me one career which did not require the ability to write and communicate effectively, every one of them swore to me that they would eventually show me just how wrong I was. Not one of the aforementioned students made it through my class with a passing grade. This is not because of any disdain for them on my part. Rather it comes from the fact they did not turn in any of the required papers because they chose instead to use their energy in trying to research various careers in order to try to find even one where effective writing skills were not important. I wish I were making that up but I'm not.

Thank you so much for your time,

James Altman

My dear readers,

Well, here is what I have of my bibliography so far. I wasn't sure if we were supposed to include articles out of our textbook yet so I didn't. However, I will definitely use a few in my conference paper. In any case, enjoy.

ENG 701 ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY

1. Johnston, Linda, Lawrence A. Beard, and Laura Bowden Carpenter Assistive technology: Access for all Students. Upper Saddle River, NJ. : Pearson/Merrill Prentice Hall, 2007.

This book provides an excellent overview of the different types of assistive technologies available at the time of its publication. Included are descriptions and relative evaluations of not only speech recognition technologies, but also adaptive computer equipment such as different types of keyboards and mouses. These are most likely the type of technologies I will focus on in my paper because they are the sorts of technology I use most frequently myself. That is not to say that technologies for those with visual and hearing impairments are not discussed at great length in this volume. I found reading the sections quite illuminating they are just simply less relevant to what I'm doing.

2. Scherer, Marcia J. Connecting to Learn: Educational and Assistive Technology for People with Disabilities. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association, 2004.

This volume also provides an overview of assistive technologies of various types. However, it also takes the extra step of addressing at least in part the reasons certain assistive technologies are necessary in some situations and not others. Moreover, there is a brief discussion (too brief in my estimation) of what it took to draw attention to the need for assistive technology both inside of and outside of the classroom. I think this will provide a good basis.

3. Wilson, James C. and Lewiecki-Wilson, Cynthia. “Constructing a Third Space: Disability Studies, the Teaching of English, and Institutional Transformation” in Disability studies: Enabling the humanities. Ed. Snyder, Sharon L.; Brenda Jo Brueggemann and Rosemarie Garland Thomson,; New York: Modern Language Association of America 2002.

In conjunction with the entry directly following in this bibliography, this article appears to focus most of its energy on the struggle to include physically disabled students more fully in humanities classrooms. I have not yet had a chance to fully go through this piece but its ideas that including the disabled necessitates a fundamental change not only in education but in all areas of life is very powerful for me. I am eager to see exactly what transformations are referred to. If they refer to policy (as I think they do) or the different applications of various assistive technologies (which what I have read also indicates) then it will help me to make clear that there is not one single “super-technology” that will suffice for everyone.

4. Brueggemann , Brenda Jo. “An Enabling Pedagogy” in Disability studies: Enabling the humanities. Ed. Snyder, Sharon L.; Brenda Jo Brueggemann and Rosemarie Garland Thomson,; New York: Modern Language Association of America 2002.

Like the previous entry in this bibliography this essay lays out some of the pitfalls which have unfortunately come along with trying to make the classroom more inclusive. It also gives good analysis and critique of many assistive technologies and the ways that they are currently implemented. This includes a rather scathing review of the very voice recognition software I am using to construct this very bibliography. If nothing else this essay will help me to demonstrate a fact I sometimes forget, namely, that assistive technology is not perfect and that it is not a cure-all.

5. Berninger, Virginia W. and Winn, William D. “Implications of Advancements in Brain Research and Technology for Writing Development, Writing Instruction, and Educational Evolution” in Handbook of writing research Ed. MacArthur, Charles A.; Steve Graham; Jill Fitzgerald. New York: Guilford Press, 2008.

this article discusses continual advances in research as to how the brain works normally, and also how it might be expected to work with varying degrees of different disabilities. This includes my own condition, cerebral palsy and hydrocephalus. Just as importantly, if the idea that due to the differing degrees of brain function between disabilities the use of speech recognition software may yield wildly different results. Thus, speech recognition software is not necessarily the best for everyone. As such, the article details not only how research is continuing to try to make speech recognition software more usable for different types of disabilities, but also alternatives such as word prediction software, and motion sensitive writing programs. These will allow me not only to interweave my own experience with what I have read it again to show that one type of assistive technology is not necessarily perfect for everyone.

6. MacArthur, Charles A. “The effects of new technologies on writing and writing processes” in Handbook of writing research Ed. MacArthur, Charles A.; Steve Graham; Jill Fitzgerald. New York: Guilford Press, 2008.

This article’s themes are sort of what I had in mind when I wrote my dissonance paper and talked about Allen Ginsberg using his tape recorder. It talks about how parts of or the whole of the composition process can be fundamentally altered based upon the composition media employed by the writer. It talks about how the relative speed and ease of composing on a computer or another media beyond paper and pencil has opened up writing beyond the traditional academic and literary fields. It will help me I believe to show the fundamental differences I perceive in the writing process when composing by voice as opposed to by hand.

7. Quinlan, Thomas. “Speech Recognition Technology and Students with Writing Difficulties: Improving Fluency” Journal of Educational Psychology 96.2 2004.

As the title implies this article deals with the use of speech recognition technology by and with writers, disabled and otherwise, who might otherwise be reluctant to write. It discusses particularly how many struggling writers and given access to this type of technology are able to write much more freely and coherently because they perceive less of a disconnect between the thoughts in their heads and their words on the page. In other words, by not having to take the intermediate step of physically writing anything down and all which that involves, these writers are more fully able to concentrate on delivering their thoughts in a more well constructed manner. Some of the implications of this article concerning relative physical ease and the ability to focus more fully on the thoughts needed to construct interesting prose I have thought about for many years. It will be nice to interweave my own experience using this type of technology with the experimental type experiences of someone looking at it from a more objective point of view.

8. McNaughton, David. “'You Talk, it Types?'--Not Quite: Speech Recognition Technology for Post-secondary Students with Disabilities” Journal of Post-Secondary Education and Disability 13.2 1998.

This article centers around what I would have to say is the one Achilles' heel of the sort of speech recognition technology I use. That is, the fact that its recognition is not always accurate. That certain level of inaccuracy the article contends has stopped this type of technology from thus far been more widely adopted in education and elsewhere. With this I agree, but I believe that once I have had time to fully combine the article's criticisms of this type of software with my other research and personal experience I can still show that for many students like myself speech recognition software is a tool with many more advantages than disadvantages.

Thank you so much for your time,

James Altman

Number 8: for the week of March 11, 2010

My dear readers,

The overall theme I see in this week's articles is the idea of inclusion. Namely, what does it involve, and how should it be done? Moreover, what would be the result if and when it is done? This is a type of subject that resonates with me deeply given my physical condition and the sorts of adaptations to the composition process and the thinking that goes with it that I have had to make as a result. In a nutshell, this week's articles remind us that the world is changing no longer are the literary or composition assumptions of dead white males sufficient for everyone. Mind you, while traditional Anglo-American culture is not as world dominating as it used to be, its perceived dominance can lend a sense of marginality to other voices in literary and composition studies.

Flynn makes the assertion in "Composing As a Woman" that composition studies has been marginalized because those who teach it are marginalized both socially and politically. I mostly agree with this, I would simply caution her if I could, that it is not only women who teach composition or literature. Regardless, I believe that the marginality of composition studies comes as much from a lack of understanding of its importance as from the gender demographics of its dedicated instructors. After all, as we have read over and over again there is still a strong segment in English that believes writing is a finite skill that can be ultimately mastered very early on in a person's academic career and therefore should be flawless by the time a student reaches college. Well, anyone who has taught English 101 or 102 knows that this is not the case. I admit, the bulk of comments I have to put on student papers do not have to do with content but instead with mechanical issues. What can I do? I can't just ignore such mistakes, or else the students may never stop making them, and that isn't a good thing either.

I am all in favor of including women writers in discussions of composition and literature in the way described in "Feminism in Composition". When I introduce my students to various literary styles and movements through their 10 minute writings I do my best to have a good balance of male and female writers. The trouble with it is, partially owing to the fact that I am a male when I introduce my students to a female writer, many of my students, both male and female, seem to cop an attitude that I am only introducing said female writer for the sake of "political correctness". I assure you this is not the case, but I sometimes have a hell of a time convincing them of that. Is it just that they are so conditioned to accept male writers as legitimate and female writers as marginal?

Royster's article touches on the same idea of marginality when she describes having to sit through diatribes about her own experience by people who know little about her. You might think as a white male of Southern lineage that I would have no experience with this. However, as a physically disabled student I have had to deal with this many times throughout my life. Particularly, in junior high and high school my teachers often made assumptions about what they thought I could and couldn't do based on their own estimations of disabled people they had previously known but who had not had the same or even a similar disability to my own. Yet because they were the authority figures I had to, at least in the beginning, conform to their expectations and only gradually be able to show them what I could actually do. Frustratingly, coming to college did not end this scenario. In college though at least I had the option of dropping a course if the professor seemed unwilling to accommodate me physically.

I love how "on the rhetoric and precedents of racism gives the example of the Spanish missionaries talking to the Incan wise men, and how when the natives did not automatically understand and agree with what the Spaniards were saying the Spaniards became angry, attacked, and robbed them. In an academic sense, isn't that what happens every time a teacher runs across a student who just can't or won't get with the program? Most professors, when faced with a student who just cannot manage to grasp the ideas behind standard English will first try to pawn the student off on anybody they can, and then invariably when that doesn't work will become frustrated with the student and probably issue a bad grade. I can say this, knowing that I have done it myself.

It's like the second teacher comment in the Zamel article where the professor says that the ESL students he has encountered are not adequately prepared to do the work he asks of them. Well no, if you focus only on surface correctness, standards of which can vary from language to language and even dialect to dialect then maybe they aren't prepared, but is that all there is? How are these same students performing other aspects of the class? Like it talks about in "the Place the world Englishes" English is now a truly multi-national language. England America Canada and Australia no longer necessarily are the standard bearers of English. The Caribbean and other parts of the former British Empire have begun to take over that role.
Despite this, standard English composition as almost wholeheartedly refused to adapt to any other dialect than that of upper-class white bred Anglo America. Please understand, as I say this I am fully aware that I am a white male of European American ancestry but the fact remains high, and those like me are no longer a majority. Although I found the article by Silva the least comprehensible of those we dealt with this week I do think it made some important points. This is especially true when he talked about the idea that second language students appeared to expel more of their energy on trying to achieve surface correctness. Well, of course, if you're trying to fit into a culture that is not your own because you think it would benefit you to do so then you are going to try to emulate those whose position you desire as much as possible.

It hasn't necessarily to do with composition, but the entire time I was growing up, my family, particularly my mother, insisted I appear as "normal" as I possibly could in every aspect of my life. That included entering mainstream classes several years before I thought I was ready, and after a while even refusing to associate with many of my former special-education classmates. Why did I do this? Because that's what "normal" people were supposed to do, I thought. It's funny to think back on it now, but in the late 1980s and early 1990s, I considered it the greatest compliment in the world for someone to say to me "you don't act disabled". I would smile ear to ear every time someone said that. It was not until years later that I realized how ridiculous that was. Of course I act disabled, because I am disabled. The people giving me that "complement" were the ones who didn't act disabled because they weren't. I can only imagine that ESL students and other minorities go through the same types of situations everyday.

Thank you so much for your time,

James Altman

Number 7: for the week of March 4, 2010

My dear readers,

The main idea I encounter in this week's readings is the idea of audience. What is an audience in terms of writing? How should it be addressed? What are the consequences of addressing it in certain ways and not in others? So I found each of the articles for this week interesting and informative, I also found them contradictory and on first reading confusing. Maybe that is emblematic of the idea of audience in thought concerning composition studies of late.
I agree with Lunsford that the "audience response model" put forth by Mitchell and Taylor is a good try but doesn't cover everything. I could see her point that they tried to play up the strength of their argument while ignoring the weaknesses. Though the way the article was written it was difficult for me to tell which was which. Other that is in the idea that there is not nearly as much consensus about what features constitute "good writing" as many teachers of composition might think. Such disagreement can lead to the fixation on surface correctness we have read about previously in the course.

I have to agree with the idea behind "The Writer's Audience Is Always a Fiction". That is, that even though you have to have something or someone on which to focus your writing purpose you're always just guessing. I love the reference to Henry James since I do believe that in most of his fiction he had in mind a reader who was not me. When we say writers write for an audience what we really mean I think is that they have a focus group in mind. In other words there are people they specifically want to reach, and as long as they reach them anyone else they also impact is just a bonus. I would be willing to bet (and not just because I do it myself in my own writing) that most writers imagine their ideal audience is composed of people very much like themselves. I'm reminded of the ancient Egyptians, who, when they created their ancient hieroglyphics had in mind a future audience that they thought would be able to easily understand them. The fact that it took the Rosetta Stone for us to make any headway in the department shows that imagining one's audience is an inexact science.

Moreover so are the often conflicting contradictory ideas of collaboration and originality. On the one hand in the opening of the article by Porter we see an offshoot of collaboration, a sort of intertextuality with the monk gathering up the remnants of previously larger texts. There is no real indication whether he has any idea who wrote the pieces he is scooping up. Now, by modern standards, if he did any kind of compiling without citing the author (and in some cases even that isn't enough) then he is a plagiarist. But, keep in mind that era of history would not have seen him that way. The whole idea of originality as we know it today mostly comes out of Romanticism. Up until just a couple of hundred years ago, it was expected that a writer will work very closely with established models and would show his or her skill by adapting those models to the conditions of the time. Think about it, if modern standards of plagiarism had existed throughout history many of the greatest writers and thinkers would probably have been kicked out of school. I'm thinking of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Thomas Jefferson, and William Shakespeare among many others. None of them did what they did exclusively by themselves they all borrowed from and learned from what came before them. Now, don't misunderstand me if I write something that becomes famous I want to receive the credit. However, I have always believed that good thought will breed more good thought. That is the point of so many of these articles we have encountered. Nothing happens in a vacuum. Therefore, why then do we expect our students to produce writing in a vacuum (that is, writing that is supposedly entirely original) when we know such things do not really happening in other areas of life? The article by Johnson essentially says that the only place we still seem to think in terms of the lone genius is in student writing when searching for plagiarism. That strikes me as strange.
Concerning the article "collaborative learning and the conversation of mankind", I can identify with the idea stated on page 417 that many students refused tutoring help when it was offered. I actually lived the situation though not in literature. I initially refused to take advantage of tutoring services in math 120. This is even though I knew I needed the help. I am not stupid. So why would I do this? Simply because I saw having to ask for help as a sign of weakness, of academic unworthiness. Moreover, I remembered the trouble I had had trying to graduate from high school after having been in special education as a child. I did not want to be tutored and then have someone, somewhere along the line trying to withhold my bachelor’s degree simply because I had "broken down" and gotten tutoring.

The fear I've just described may sound stupid but please remember when the situation arose where I needed to ring as a freshman the scenario was still very real in my mind. This is especially true since at the time I had no idea how UNLV's administrative procedures work at all. More generally speaking I find that many students are reluctant to work together even in peer review until they know precisely how and to whom credit will be distributed. That is how nervous many of them are that something they may share with someone else might be called academic misconduct.

Thank you so much for your time,

James Altman

Number 6: for the week of February 25, 2010

My dear readers,

The main concern I encounter in this week's readings is a desire to discover what lies behind writing. When is it done? Why is it done? How is it done? I must admit, for someone with only a minimal familiarity with composition theory before entering this course the myriad of theories I encountered this week was almost too much for me. However, I was able to make some headway. First of all, by the definition laid out in "Cognition, Convention, and Certainty" I am an outer directed theorist. By which I mean simply that I have always believed nothing happens in a vacuum. Everything we do is affected by the world in which we live and our fellow beings who inhabit it along with us. While I do believe that there are parts of life and processes that can be universal, I likewise believe that they usually are not. This is mainly due to differences in perceptions of individuals and groups involved and disagreements that arise therein. In other words, generally speaking, there are things that everyone can agree on. For instance, the sun will rise tomorrow. But as for why it will do so, there may or may not be competing theories. Why? Differences in perception, which in turn grow out of differences in environment and life experience. These differences must be marshaled carefully for effective teaching.

The question posed at the beginning of the article by Flower is one which I suppose is obvious but which I had never thought of because for years I thought I knew the answer for certainty. Here's what I mean she essentially says that it is difficult to still hold the view that good writing is just a matter of making choices. Well, now, that was news to me. You see, when I was in English 206 with Dr. Leon Coburn he told us flat out on the second day of the semester that good writing was in fact nothing more than making choices and that the best writers simply learn to consistently make the best choices. I took that advice to heart and it has helped me reach the point I am at now. The four questions she poses on page 274 are interesting although somewhat repetitive. Certainly writing is driven by goal. No one would write if they didn't have a reason to. By that I do not mean, that people must be mandated to write. I simply mean a writer who feels like he has nothing to say doesn't tend to write. Setting aside potential financial reward why would a novelist compose a novel if he did not have a story he thought was worth telling? As for freezing goals as a growing network… well, yes and no. A creative person who simply enjoys the act of writing an expression may take just having written something down as an end in itself. I do that quite often you might like to know. I do deeply enjoy her discussion of the stage models of writing though it would probably mean more to me later in my career when I have read more of this type of literature.

I enjoyed the Dias chapter on distributed cognition. Its model of knowledge and information flowing to and from teachers, students, administrators etc. goes back to my earlier point nothing happens in a vacuum. I'm reminded of the old Discovery Channel TV series Connections hosted by James Burke. That was one of his main theses for the series that everything in life is connected somehow or other and that all knowledge comes out of other knowledge and then breeds still more knowledge which continues the process. I can see that in terms of evaluation at the university level. In other words the grades I give my students this semester will be not only a measuring stick for them but also for me as an instructor and the department as a whole. Since nothing happens in a vacuum, nothing can be taught in a vacuum. Hence we should try to incorporate every teaching tool from every genre and subject area we possibly can.

Russell seems to have that same idea when examining academic and nonacademic writing. I don't suppose most academics think much about nonacademic writing do they? His mention of dialogism seems only common sense to me. The cognitive and the social always worked together. In fact I would argue they help to construct and shape each other. After all, without some societally based knowledge to start with how can you really understand anything?

Kellogg has it right with the stages developing writers go through. At first we simply tell knowledge on paper with no sense of decorum or style. We don't concern ourselves with audience or how what we write may be perceived in the future. In knowledge transforming the move beyond that occurs as I take it we begin to move from writer based to reader-based prose. In other words, we figure out that we are not the only being that may ever see what we write. In the final stage knowledge crafting not only do we know that our audience is not as but we take deliberate steps to affect what they would feel and how they will perceive us. I'll wager very few writers who have ever lived really do this effectively. The idea of deliberate practice is very well put. After all, whatever one's view on the writing process the more that process is attempted the more improvement is possible.

I particularly enjoyed Ong’s in the way that he talked about orality. I had never thought about the idea of written language being more permanent than its oral counterpart. I've never considered that the moment a word is spoken its sound is already nearly gone. That is an interesting concept I will have to ponder further when I have more time. Mind you, spoken language can achieve immortality if it is heard by someone who remembers it. The many bardic traditions of Europe and elsewhere testify to this fact. Indeed, though the sounds of individual spoken words may disappear more quickly than their printed counterparts if they are remembered those words may outlast printed versions which can be lost or damaged. I remember in bibliography and methods with Dr. Erwin reading a case study about the Maori in New Zealand during the early days of Christian missionaries in the islands. The missionaries were so intent on printing texts so that oral traditions would not be lost they failed to realize that fueled the Maori bothered to read the printed texts preferring instead to recite things orally, a method that they found more reliable.

Ong brings up the point that people who come out of cultures that are highly print-based did not quite know what to do when faced with information that cannot be written down. On the other hand those who come out of oral traditions do not have this problem. On a brief personal note, there are some members of my family who even to this day have never learned to read. They rely entirely on orality and memory for the transference and retention of information. Honestly, I operate that way mostly too.

My physical condition makes it difficult for me to hand write or even hand type long works. I either tape-record notes or simply memorize what I hear. As a matter of fact, this very blog which you are reading was composed not by typing on a keyboard but by speaking into a special software program that transcribes my words. I wonder, would some of the theorists we have read so far consider me less than literate based on how I must live my academic life?

Thank you so much for your time,

James Altman

DISSONANCE PAPER

February 14, 2010

My dear readers,

As I have been considering what topic I'd choose for my final conference length paper, I have felt myself at something of a disadvantage. That disadvantage does not come so much from an inadequacy in the quality of our discussions as much as from my own unfamiliarity with most areas of composition theory. Granted, I took English 711 Studies in Language as a master’s student but honestly I am a neophyte when it comes to theory. In other words, even though I have read ahead in our book I do not have a huge theoretical background to draw on when trying to think of what topics might not only be of interest to me but also to others in the field of composition. In any case, here is what I have come up with. I considered several topics before settling on the one which will serve as the basis for my conference length paper.

When I first read the syllabus for this course and realized I would have to write this type of a paper I initially thought of a couple of topics in education that I absolutely hate. These are the Bell curve and standardized testing. Throughout my career as a student and an education undergrad, both of these topics were a source of much frustration and fascination with me. Both as a student and teacher I often felt stymied by both of them. I felt that they both pigeonholed both me and my students. For instance, when I was very young I was given a supposedly unbiased standardized test which labeled me mildly mentally retarded. It took several months for my family to prove that the contents of the test set me up to fail because they involved identifying objects that only a child that could walk normally would encounter regularly. Where would I be if my family had not fought as hard as they did for fair testing? For that reason I initially wanted to look at how student writing differs in grades when they are administered standardized tests and grades in which they are not.

Also, I want to explore if there were any alternative models to the Bell curve for measuring student progress. As far as the Bell curve, I have always considered it a sheer tool of convenience. In other words, if you lump everyone in the middle you don't have to pay much attention to those on either end. I say this having been on both of the extremes of the Bell curve. Along with being in special-education until the end of fourth grade, I was also in GATE (gifted and talented) from the start of sixth grade until graduating from high school. While in special-education I mostly felt neglected. I felt that the teachers didn't care about my intellectual development. In fact, several of them told me so. It was at that time in my life that I began doing the outside research and study that I continue to this day just to try to get the intellectual stimulation I didn't feel like I was getting the classroom.

You might think that once I got into GATE the situation would change but he didn't. Oh, sure, ostensibly I was treated better because I was "gifted" but it really meant no extra intellectual stimulation. The teachers in charge of the program are overworked and under funded. Therefore, nothing much ever came of the experience beyond being able to mention it on University applications. However, I quickly decided the topic could far too easily degenerate into a simple rant against standardized testing. Therefore, I moved on.

Secondly I thought about doing my paper on the idea of healing through writing. That resonated with me particularly because of my recent stint in the hospital and my subsequent desire to try to return to some semblance of normalcy in my life. However, the little research on the topic that I have had time to do shows me, that unless there is something I missed, healing through writing does not necessarily talk about what I want to talk about. The only examples I could find concerned cancer survivors. Now that's all well and good but I am not a cancer survivor, and since the paper is supposed to resonate with me that won't work.

And I considered doing something looking at the general topic of how and why orality has been marginalized in modern American society. For most of my life the physical act of writing has been difficult and painful for me. Oral communication, therefore, has usually been preferable. Unfortunately, I wasn't entirely sure what I could do with the topic other than trying to examine the differences in products produced with oral and written methods. Luckily, however, that basic idea led me to the topic that I feel confident I want to do my paper on.

Let me preface this by saying I have had next to no time to research and therefore my reading list is at this point nonexistent. That being said I would like to look at composition methods. In other words, what if any of the differences in text produced, say, with pen and paper, by typing manually, using talk and type software, and/or speaking into a tape recorder. I have no idea at this point what these differences might be or what they might entail I just know there must be some. Also the fact that one of my favorite poets, Allen Ginsberg, composed many of his later poems into a tape recorder and commented that he thought the method lent "something" to his verse interests me to try to discover what that "something", that I have also felt, might actually involve.

Thank you so much for your time,

James Altman

Number 5: for the week of February 18, 2010

My dear readers,

The main issue permeating that which we read is that of grammatical correctness. What is it? Why is it necessary and how did it become so central to all thought about writing? The two articles by Connors trace an historical trail of the current fixation on grammar and mechanics within composition studies. Not simply the teacher being a queen with a red ink pen as a royal scepter, the articles, particularly "mechanical correctness", focus on the fetish with of grammar as symptomatic of an overall growth of hierarchy in all areas of an emerging America. It is only natural that in the early years of the Republic, America would wish, after so many years under the stagnant hierarchy of the British monarchy, to break loose and have, for all intensive purposes, no hierarchy whatsoever. But as let's say, "the Revolutionary generation" faded from the scene after about 1820, those who came after them saw America as needing to fit in with the hierarchies of Europe she had initially left behind.

More generally came the idea that Americans need more than a few years of primary education. Add to that incessant fear on the part of eastern bluebloods that the uncouth nature of the ever expanding Western frontier was polluting genteel society and you have a recipe for eventual standardization in most areas of life particularly grammar. Thus, I suppose you could say that grammar had a small part in unifying America. Though it was at the loss, in some cases, of regionalism and colloquialism in language. They sought to forsake regional dialect in favor of a standard lexicon which became what we call standard English today.

The very fact that there are so many different theories of grammar indicates that linguistically we are not as United as some people might like. I mention this only because I wonder if I have ever had to, in checking for grammar, unwittingly stunt the growth of this generation’s Twain or Faulkner. I mentioned in class earlier in the semester the idea of James Fenimore Cooper's pathfinder Natty Bumpo and the fact that although he is supposed to be an archetype frontiersman he speaks in a manner which is almost Shakespearean. The idea being that American readers of Cooper's time did not at all mind reading about the frontiersman so long as he spoke like a blueblood.

The same idea applies when Connors talks about counting physical mechanical errors in student papers and having correctness cards. In those types of scenarios very little emphasis is given to the content of what students actually write. This tells me that under such a system students can write practically anything they want as long as it is grammatically pristine. I am not sure that is the best course of action. With your kind indulgence, I will now relate a personal example to illustrate what I mean. When I was in my student teaching my university appointed supervisor demanded that I keep a weekly journal. In theory, it was to contain my thoughts and reflections upon the student teaching experience. For the first several entries that is exactly what it contained. However, I quickly found my supervisor only concerned her comments with the grammatical correctness of each entry and, so far as I could see, paid no attention to the actual substance of what I wrote. When I approached her about this she told me flat out "your thoughts are your own business, your grammar is mine."

Flabbergasted by that revelation the next week I tried an experiment. While I kept my weekly reflective journal for my own edification, I did not give my supervisor that entry. Instead I gave her several pages of the first draft of a novel I was composing at the time. I knew those pages were grammatically pristine because I had a friend of mine who was a textual editor help me go over them previously. When I received my journal back the following week the only comment on it was "grammar and mechanics much improved. Keep up the good work." I wonder does it make me a bad person that for the second half of that semester the official journal I submitted actually contained no mention of my student teaching experience but was instead a collection of my previous short prose writings?

I gave the previous example only to illustrate the extreme fixation with grammar that I believe this week articles referred to. The article “grammar grammars and the teaching of grammar” points over and over again to studies revealing that a simple obsession with surface grammar and mechanics not only does not improve the quality of thought expressed in student writing it doesn't even really improve surface correctness in the long-term. Why then such obsession with it? I think it comes back again to Connor’s idea that America, while professing to be a classless society, likes the idea of creating hierarchies and elites and to set certain people apart from the rest of society. I think Butler sums it up very well and he essentially said that the idea of grammar and correctness as we know them today comes from the need to have some way to tell who is doing better and who is not.

Of course, who needs help and who doesn't can depend on who already understands the idea of academic discourse best. In other words who can make their own experience sound academic most readily. In "reflections on academic discourse" Peter Elbow argued, as he does elsewhere, not so much against traditional academic discourse as for inclusion along with it other types of writing. He gives the example that many areas like the FDA and the Air Force require types of writing that are not emphasizing traditional academic discourse. Moreover, along with his previous contention that student experience should build writing assignments he argues that proper writing instruction should try to incorporate as many different genres and types of writing as possible in order to prepare, for instance, a future government worker or military officer for the type of writing they will have to. It is an often ignored fact in university environments that most of the students pursuing higher education do not intend to build a career in academia. Instead they want to get their training in a particular field and get out quickly as possible. Their future careers require types of writing which may or may not have anything to do with the traditional academic writing.

That’s where “responding to student writing” comes in. In Sommers gives the example of the essay that is marked up so bad I can barely read it. She said that the simultaneous demands that the student condensed the essay in some areas and expanded and others serve to confuse the student and muddle the revision process. I don't think I agree with that. While I understand beginning writers may have trouble for performing both steps at once I keep reminding myself that life is not simple and life is not linear. We are often called upon in life to do many things at once.

Thank you so much for your time,

James Altman

Number 4: for the week of Thursday, February 11, 2010

My dear readers,

The overarching themes running through the readings for this week regard the idea of writing itself. Is it product or process? If it is process, what does that involve? What is the teacher's role in said process? Most importantly, what is the student’s role?

While this week's articles pretty much agree on the idea of writing being taught as process, they're not exactly the same on how it should be done or what it means to do it. Peter Elbow, as he does in his book Writing without Teachers advocates a classroom where the teacher is a facilitator not an overarching authority. He says that students should have absolute autonomy in selecting not only their writing topics but also their writing assignments.

Many teachers probably would like to do that, but are reluctant to allow students such freedom because of outside concerns and pressures about curriculum and standards. Also I think many teachers are nervous about giving students autonomy in any area because they are afraid it will simply breed anarchy. That, and lack of technological resources, likely also keeps many teachers from employing new media like blogs in their classrooms in the way that "Moving to the Public" prescribes.

Also, I think, in many situations many teachers are reluctant to employ new techniques because they think that since they have achieved success under the old techniques new methods are unnecessary. Let me try to give you an example.

Murray, in his article "teach writing as a process not product" refers very accurately I think to a teacher looking At student papers the way a coroner looks at a recently deceased corpse, in other words trying to determine what killed it and how that death could have been prevented. Well, that approach works well on Forensic Files, or Dr. G. Medical Examiner in a situation where you know your subject matter is already dead. However in terms of student writing such an approach is an effective because whether you realize it or not you're already assuming that there is something fundamentally wrong with the writing, and what good does that do?

Murray continues Elbow's idea that students should use their own experience to create their writing topics. I also like how Murray points out the idea that academic language is fundamentally different from everyday speech. Now, I do not think this is a bad thing in and of itself. It only causes a problem when teachers forget that most students do not use academic language except when requested to do so. To most students the academic language required in college is as foreign as the lexicon of Shakespeare or Chaucer.

I love Murray's idea of letting students write as many drafts as is necessary. Unfortunately, who has time for that? The department insists I get my students through four formal papers every semester, come hell or high water. Granted, they can do as many drafts of each paper as there is time for, but still time is a limiting factor. As unfortunately is student patience. Very few of the students I have ever taught have the patience to do more than one or two drafts before they just want to turn the final draft in and get on with their lives. The pace of college life, and modern life in general, demands they keep moving from point A to point B no matter what.

When Emig attempts to draw distinctions between writing and other types of discourse I think she goes a little too far in the attempt. She says that writing is learned behavior whereas talking is instinctive, that's not true we learn to talk just like we learn everything else. She calls writing artificial as opposed to the natural process of talking. On the contrary, many people are much more open and honest in their writings say a personal journal than they are in spoken discourse especially if they think their listeners may be judgmental of them. I mean, I understand her point she is trying to set up her context, I just think she goes a little too for.

Overall, I agree with her premise that learning speaking and writing can go together and help promote the intellectual development of everyone involved. Although her study, with its graphs and charts, and numbers, was more than a little hard for me to follow I do like Perl's idea of comparing how more skilled and unskilled writers think about the revision process. I saw the same idea in Sommers too. Skilled writers look at revision as trying to really improve a piece of writing by letting it breathe and more effectively say what they wanted to say. They understand that having to revise something does not necessarily mean it was wrong but simply stated less effectively.
Less skilled writers invariably saw the need for a revision as an indication they had somehow screwed up. Moreover, the differences in the writing quality between the samples appeared to come down to how much the different writers understood that their readers might not know what they knew and might not have had the same experiences they had and therefore might need more information. Less skilled writers apparently pictured themselves when writing and never really thought about having to explain themselves to someone who did not already know what they were talking about.

When I was a senior in high school my professor reminded me to never assume that my reader already had the information necessary to understand my argument. I have never forgotten that and therefore have always tried to give as much information in any piece of writing as I possibly could. I would rather give too much than too little. Mind you, perhaps the reason some writers do not explain themselves as well as we think they should is because they are trying to construct their own topic or context for their writing and perhaps they've never had that opportunity before and just don't yet know how.

Thank you so much for your time,

James Altman

Number 3: for the week of Thursday, February 4, 2010

My dear readers,

Overall, this week’s articles concern the Bell curve although it is not mentioned in so many words in any articles, by which I mean than the typical students up to an acceptable level somewhere near the middle of academic expectations. Hence all the different labels used in the two Rose articles to describe writers in need of assistance. The label “handicapped” especially reminded me not only my own substandard often degrading experiences in special-education classrooms but also Rose's seminal book Lives on the Boundary. The basic thesis of which I take to be if you're not up to par, then in society's view, there must be something inherently wrong with you.

The reason this is such a big thing for me is not only have I both attended and taught special-education courses, but also I was initially, briefly, denied the right to graduate from high school because some district administrators believed that no one who ever been in special-education at any time in their lives could possibly succeed beyond a high school level. Beyond the personal I believe the article “Inventing the University” sums up the core problem addressed in these articles in its title. Every one of this week articles talks about students having to invent the university, that is, having to learn the culture of the University and adapt to it as quickly as possible.

It’s the cold hard truth that in most university situations an individual students experience does not matter except to the extent to which it can be phrased in terms of experiences which traditional academics will understand. In a purely academic sense it does not matter that I nearly died on the operating table only a few short weeks ago. That experience only matters, academically speaking, if I can interweave it into an academic point which connects to a particular assignment I've been given. Any other mention of my experience then is, technically speaking, completely irrelevant. Different attitudes and cultural mores are only important in academia, as it stands now, to the extent to which they can make themselves sound virtually identical to that type of reality with which conventional academics are already comfortable.

The whole idea of academics being comfortable or uncomfortable with a situation underlines the article Diving In: an introduction to basic writing which outlines the five stages that teachers of writing have to go through to reconcile themselves to the task of teaching their students. The stages described sounds somewhat reminiscent of the stages of grief after the death of a loved one. After all in the first stage guarding the Tower tries to act as if nothing has changed at all, as if students are just waiting breathlessly for your knowledge with nothing else on their minds or in their lives. Mind you, it is actually sounding the depths which is most interesting to me. It talked about teachers being reflective about themselves about their teaching style about conditions in which they teach. But honestly how many teachers actually do that? How many teachers actually look critically at their own teaching style and when something isn't going well are willing to say to themselves maybe I'm not doing what I should. Maybe it's not the students’ fault? I constantly try to think about my own teaching style and I try not to lay the blame for what if anything that goes wrong onto student until I have made sure that I'm doing everything that I can do right.

Mind you, I would say that because of my position, but the fact remains I am trying. But how many people do that? How many teachers think consciously or not, that students simply are not worthy of their talents? How many teachers are willing to dive in and try to get at what is really lying behind actual student troubles with writing? Unfortunately I would say not nearly enough. This may lead to the idea mentioned in several the articles including “stretch at 10” about basic writing courses being outsourced community colleges and the varying results of such decisions. Well, of course if you feel like the problems with beginner student writing come entirely from the students and not all from the instructors, then of course someone especially with tenure status won't want to deal with the frustration of trying to bring the students up to par. I wouldn't either.
Of course, as mentioned in the “Stretch” article many of the students who took the outsourced writing classes never came back for the full university experience or if they did they didn't do well because the basic curriculum they had been taught didn't match up. How could it have? It wasn't taught by the same people with the same goals. Also I would almost bet that the students who took such basic writing classes probably faced some sort of stigma about having to do so.

Hence, unfortunately, we get to the point in the “Scarlet P” article about students plagiarizing for various reasons. One of the main ones being simply to avoid remedial classes and the stigma that may come with them. Mind you, I did think it was funny to read all the mentioning of a rising tide of plagiarism. Is that really the case? Or is it simply the fact that we started looking for it? I don't have to rethink the tide is really It's a bit like steroids in baseball I don't believe there are more players using steroids now I just think the cases of steroid users are more public right now. However the public believes that there are more than ever before. That sends another main theme of this week article the idea of perception who has the right to observe the situation and make determinations about it?

Thank you so much for your time,

James Altman