Working at the Interface: Dr. Kevin Brooks

I see that Alex Reid has already responded to (or alongside) Elizabeth Wardle's CCC article on "Mutt Genres and the Goal of Fyc." I am sure this essay will get a lot of people thinking hard, again, as she and Doug Downs wrote a much discussed piece on "writing about writing" that came out in the much read June issue of CCC two years ago. Heck, I blogged about that piece, too. I'm very sympathetic

I bet the June issue of CCC is its most read number; definitely the one I always have the most time for. I boldly claimed to Betsy that June 2009 might be the greatest issue of all time--all the pieces are of interest to me, anyway. I have started with Haswell, Haswell, and Blalock's "Hospitality in College Composition Courses" because I have been reading and thinking about hospitality with my

I'm scheduled to teach a graduate seminar in the spring of 2010, and I'd like to use this site again, continue to build on VPG type themes of appropriate social engagement for rhetoricians post 9/11. I've exchanged an email or two with a CS game designer, and I have been thinking about a course that would also develop the Second Life VPG, so maybe a two part course on gaming as social action, with part I being about pushing the VPG in the direction of games / interactive and then actually imagining / developing a game for the OLPC operating system, Sugar.

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Bob Samuels' critique of Jenkins and the "radical" advocates of technological transformation still not paying attention to widescale, material, social and economic inequalities. Calls this "automodernity" and "new libertarian consensus." Also calls the social movements of the 20th century (feminism, civil rights, etc.) postmodern critiques of modernism, but they get appropriate by academic aesthetic postmodernism, which Bob is saying we might better understand as "automodernity" because it extends modernism and cuts out the real critique.

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The last session brought up the technology vs basics debate, one that often circulates around the OLPC program. Material needs before cultural needs, in a Marxist framework. I find it really hard to argue against material needs, but I also increasingly find myself convinced that sometimes the cultural (or as Levinas, Derrida, others might say: the hospitable, friendship, etc.) might be needed to address material needs. Unless we hold onto bootstrap metaphors, alliances based on friendships might be needed to tackle material needs.

I've been taking notes on my personal blog (http://tenaday.blogspot.com) but for this 2 pm Saturday session that may or may not talk about Second Life, I thought I would keep notes on VPG.

Betsy Gilliland, "Whose logic? Multiple modalities in high school writing practices."

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Bill Cope just outline his talk about new media: will he really be able to get past McLuhan? He sees learning as being about design and synaesthesia, very McLuhan. Agency is new, he suggests; once tidy distinctions are blurred. McLuhan said this. First and second order differences, a new dynamics of difference, sees an increase in divergence due in part to increased opportunities for agency.

John Walter "Database Rhapsody: From Database to Geek DJ." Refashioning memory for digital age. Drawing on medieval tradition of not strongly distinguishing between internal and external memory; we don't really understand medieval rhetoric because we understand the history of rhetoric through the handbook tradition, and medieval rhetoric's emphasis was memory. Memory not as rote, but (

Yukiko Nishimura presenting on Japanese phone novels; showed a video of a novel being read and written. Providing good description; reporting on criticism of amateurism; Nishimura is a linguist, so she is more interested in language complexity. Shows that Keita novels linguistically look a lot like traditional print novels. Grade readability, 6-8; sample novels grades 5-9. Famous Japanese

Sustaining Peace: Nancy Barron and Sibylle Gruber. Teaching a course called “Rhetorics of Peace” as an UDW course. I wonder if we could develop an UDW class called “Writing for Change” that would be promoted as action-oriented, lots of business, project management, etc., etc. Could be pitched to “Engineers without Borders, teachers without Borders, etc.” PoliSci students? Zinn, Buddha, Day,

Attending the 2009 CW conference. Attended the morning town hall, but didn't have my laptop out. Some good ideas from Michael Day about encouraging adjunct faculty to more formally share their own ideas and practices. Other good ideas. I presented at 9:30; we got a late start so things were rushed, but Kris Blair offered a compelling vision for bringing the whole English department along with

One of the things we talked about in the WPGV class was identifying specific days of the year when we could use the Second Life Virtual Peace Garden as a place of celebration and / or commemoration.

Kathryn's water project, for example, would use World Water Day, March 22nd.
http://www.worldwaterday.org/

I just learned that September 21 is International Peace Day:
http://www.internationaldayofpeace.org/

World Refugee Day is June 20th:
http://www.un.org/Depts/dhl/refugee/

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I've been working on a manuscript for a while now, and I am ready to try out a pitch. Let me know what you think; lots of room for revision. Holding on by a Thread: The Lives of Refugees (and what individuals can do to welcome them). Holding on by a Thread is an account of the complicated lives of three refugee families in Fargo, North Dakota. Author Kevin Brooks unexpectedly found himself

Today was a Virtual Peace Garden day:

1. Heard from the CEO of the International Peace Garden. I hope you are reading this, Doug, and will contribute to the site! http://www.peacegarden.com/
2. Re-read some of Charles Jencks' Garden of Cosmic Speculation.
3. Found a "Gardens for Peace" website. http://www.gardensforpeace.org/

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I'm listening to a psychologist, Toni Schmader, report on situational cues that affect student performance, and human performance generally. She just showed a slide that summarized a research study in which boys and girls in middle school wrote 3 types of letters to younger children: an anti-drug message, a learning is incremental message, and a learning is difficult for everyone message. The

I'm starting to think about a new class for the fall of 2009: Writing in the Design Professions. I want the students to keep the VPG alive by proposing monuments and/or sections of the garden in Second Life; I won't likely make them use this site (although I should really give that more thought).

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I heard about this guy who is trying to photograph "every dot" on the North Dakota map. He has also done quite a few photos in Manitoba, Minnesota, and elsewhere.http://www.afiler.com/everydot/Scrolling through his list, I discovered Griffin (my son's name) North Dakota. Good example of "a dot."http://www.flickr.com/photos/afiler/tags/griffinnorthdakota/show/If you go to Google Maps, you can

The Wahpeton Daily News did a nice job covering Joseph's visit this Wednesday, April 22. The reporter did a great job of talking to our host, Sybil Priebe, about why ASAh is relevant to Wahpeton and their college, North Dakota State College of Science.

NPR ran a long story this morning about some North-South fighting in Malakal, a border town. The fighting was in February, which be an illustration of how slow the news moves coming out of Sudan.

When Joseph presents, we often get this question--will the peace hold? A good, legitimate question. I just wish the press would also cover the work of all the NGOs and southern Sudanese trying to build peace, trying to build an infrastructure that would stabilize the country enough so that its people wouldn't feel like going to war is their only or best option.

I would just like to extend my thanks once more to the class Topics in Rhetoric and Writing, one for which the Virtual Peace Garden is itself an appropriate extension. I took that class only some four months or so ago now from Dr. Kevin Brooks, and some of the central concepts that I learned pertaining to writing and especially to personal expression within English studies are proving highly useful to me as I push forward in my academic career.

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