So Lawrence Lessig will be on campus next Tuesday (2/20), and he will be speaking at 7pm in Hogg Auditorium, which most of you know. Since RHE 306 students are required to attend, I assume that 306 instructors will want to build some class time around discussing his talk. This may take the form of set-up before the event or follow-up after the event.

In any case, I think we could help each other by sharing our ideas here on the blog. So if you’re planning to prepare for Lessig’s talk by discussing the text in advance, how do you plan to do so?

If you use blogs in your courses (as I do--for reading responses), here's something to think about:
Blog Overload.

[X-posted]

Have you seen An Inconvenient Truth? I just heard a story on All Things Considered discussing this new documentary featuring Al Gore's global warming lecture-like riff. ATC's host Michele Norris set the stage for opposing Gore's “showmanship” to the “truth” or “science” of his lecture. Certainly, Gore’s presentation has a stylistic or performative element; some people have even wondered where this Al Gore was during the 2000 presidential campaign. But why must the performative be separated from the factual? Doesn’t this precisely reduplicate the misleading binary that has been with us at least since Plato?

Obviously, we've all fallen into the rut of late semester busyness, and though I've been wanting to say something pithy about Fred Kaplan's article over on Slate titled "Barnes & Noble Goes to Baghdad," for the moment, I'm just going to offer the link and allow all you commenters to uncover your own pith.

(I will say my reaction revolves around this claim: "The problem is that to the rest of the world, we appear to have no ideas at all." So how do we import our ideas? Send in B&N. And what does this reveal our idea to be? Well, capitalism [duh!]. In fact, it's not a matter of literally opening a B&N in Baghdad--this is a metaphor for circulating "our ideas" in the Iraqi "marketplace of ideas." But of course it's a telling metaphor [for whom, of course, we have the great liberal J.S. Mill to thank...] : if you can't distribute your ideas freely, put a price on them; then they'll seem more desirable! [According to Kaplan, "distribution is poor." So what better to improve distribution than a good business model?])

Some of you may have seen the article At Some Medical Schools, Humanities Join the Curriculum in Monday's New York Times.

Prompted by the fact that

Three years ago, the Mount Sinai School of Medicine began an art-appreciation course for medical students, joining a growing number of medical schools [like "Yale, Stanford Cornell and a few other medical schools"] that are adding humanities to the usual forced march of physiology, pathology and microbiology

this article documents several students' experience in and (potential) use of a visit to the Met.

On another blog, I recently saw the following:

"Quote"
...is a verb.

"Quotation" is a noun.

The author's point was that students need to be reminded of this. My question: do they?

Now of course, the dictionary and a study of etymology would tell us this is true, but as we all know, this is only "true" because some (uptight?) people once began to document the way people actually talk. Eventually, some (seriously uptight!!) people began to think of this documentation as rules. So if people now say--and they do quite often--that they're trying to find a quote or "that's a beautiful quote," they aren't wrong (because the "standard" is descriptive, not prescriptive) even if they "violate the rules."

I've been grading all weekend, so I'm late on an update, and I'm parasitic as well, but an interesting article appeared in The Guardian last week about readers of novels. Laura Carroll at The Valve has some interesting analysis of the article (see the final paragraph here), and I'm doing nothing more here than thinking about her analysis as it pertains to the classroom--and quoting some of her analysis.

What may interest us: It's not entirely new news--similar studies in the past have produced similar results--but if there's value in recognizing that women read novels more than men, what ought this recognition do for our classrooms--both for how we teach novels and for how we regard gender and its production of taste?

Laura writes:

Maybe you've seen it already, the report in the Guardian about the latest instalment in a current English research project into fiction-reading patterns and gender.  Personal Political has a very good post up about the article, and various other bloggers including Echidne have commented as well.

So there are all kinds of academics blogging out there, and I'm just curious about who you all read. RSS feeds make it possible to funnel all the blogs you read into one location (a reader such as this or this), so you get something a little like this (a story) or this (headlines with summaries).

I know Jim tried this last semester, but I'm not sure how far he took it. Anyway, I'm considering having students' 2nd submission of their 3rd paper be a revision of another student's work. In essence, two students would swap papers and revise the one they didn't originally write.

One reason to do this is that it raises the question of whose work 3.2 is. It allows the students to participate in a community-produced project, and in my Rhetoric of the Individual course, I think this is a useful way of interrogating the topic.

There are other, rhetorical reasons for such work: it allows students to get a close look at what TRM calls "writer-based prose" and to struggle with how (1) to read for the ideas that the author meant/means to convey and (2) to articulate those ideas more carefully, having seen already how a failure to articulate can go wrong. Further, it's often easier for students to see the problems with others' papers than with their own, meaning this could be a way that authors get the most out of revision--because they would do the most revising in this scenario.