July 24, 2007
As a university, we've arrived
RIAA targets Case Western students in ongoing extortion racket. Let's see how the university responds.
July 20, 2007
GoogleApps@Case
Jeremy Smith's blog provides info for getting started using Google apps - gmail, start page, some desktop stuff? - with your Case acct. Really good stuff.
UPDATE: I really do think this is going to be pretty cool.
interface design battle royale
My favorite's ideo.
July 06, 2007
GET GREAT DEAL ON V|AGKRA & ENGINEEING DEGREE
Via SANS:
Google search for .edu sites hacked into holding Cialis spam
April 18, 2007
Teaching Tech Writing: Week 14
On Theory, Practice, and Method. Patricia Sullivan and James E. Porter.
So, the different conceptual categories for "types of academic work" - theory, practice, and methodology - do their own work, according to S & P, in legitimizing the claims specific to the work ("Our position is that the concepts 'theory,' 'practice,' and 'methodology' as used in professional writing represent different types of socially constructed warrants" (301)). The authors' position suggests that genres (and method), broadly applied, are not merely descriptive of types of professional writing. The work does not simply fit into one of these categories, the data or supporting claims found within becoming self-sufficient and establishing a "closed" argument: the categories themselves become part of the work, establishing a warrant by descriptive fiat. "Because this work displays the markings of genre x," establishes the categorical description, "it is best served by genre x." The power of this operation erases the presence of the category of work itself, removing it from considerations of feasibility.
The authors wish to see conceptions of type become more "dynamic and negotiable." A binary between theory/practice invalidates the suggestion of their combination; therefore, the authors move toward a "notion" of praxis, founded on an openness in practice. I think we here in the English department understand the ramifications of the theory/practice split as well as anybody else. And I think we understand the importance of establishing conciliatory terms between the two; we're no longer able to run the business like it's 1979. Yet we still tend to split concerns, if not on a day-by-day basis as the authors suggest happens in the professional writing classroom, but spread over the coursework. There is the theory class, and the methods class. There is the Foucault day, and then there is the annotated bibliography day. The problem occurs after: when, having proved ourselves in coursework, we begin applying theory - the institutional imperative to see a variety of theory as the only likely approach tends to place student writing within the bounds of the theoretical. Maybe because it's easier, in a way -
But that, of course, ignores the pervasive reach of theory into every corner of our practice. Everyone, after all, theorizes a reading, or the act of reading - there's no reading outside of theory. It's like a paradox from a Rush song! "You may choose to integrate a pathology of the subject into a fully realized materialist critique of cultural capital/If you choose not to problematize the recursive nature of hypertext reading practices, you still have made a choice!" ZING
But what is a fully situated reading? - one in which we understand not only the theoretical, asynchronous forces at work, but also the place in which we do the work, our timely surroundings. This is the observational power of the practice outlook - the question is how to combine the twin understandings into what the authors call "praxis." Prudential action is of course the understanding between subject and structures of power - how do act in the best interests of society? and all that - and expresses itself in the writing context that authors envision by being open to the suggestive influence of theory or practice while in the methodological throes of practice or theory. Seeing the forest for the trees, as it were, but still being able to refer to close-ups of the bark.
doodz I am th eh hungzor i need some foodz
April 16, 2007
Statists have let the handicapped steal all the good parking spots. SET PHASERS ON "KILL"
Now, sometimes I get angry when I don't get that parking spot on Bellflower, but I don't go around calling people Marxists.
(Attention Libertarians: I do not watch Star Trek. Please resist the urge to school me on phaser settings.)
April 15, 2007
Digital Literacies: Siva, Intro
Shades of earlier readings...SV's extremes are sounding familiar: the "oligarchy vs. anarchy" debate sounding somewhat like the "us, now vs. them, later" distinction established by Lessig, authority being the power behind the switch that transforms a society from dreads-n-squats anarchists to a regulated, top-down market. Dialectic or polarized ideology? You decide!
I'm not sure, however, how the "collapse of inconvenience" maps neatly onto the two-sided struggle SV attempts to describe. Certainly we live in a digital ecosystem/network in which plenty of good stuff is "inconvenient to find, distribute, or deploy." LL's point, for instance, is not that inconvenience has collapsed, but that it has become a full-on business plan. On the other hand, for every technology that removes the friction implicit in earlier systems, SV claims technologies are also produced that engineer different varieties of friction. The problem (beyond the slightly competitive nature of these twin claims) in these arguments is the simplicity of the technologies that SV imagines: both "blunt" and "simple," the technological tools are presented - as perhaps the earlier information systems were reduced - in fairly autonomous terms, ignoring the social values and contexts within which they work. But the social context is what makes these sorts of argument work; if SV is going to treat p2p systems as tool instead of concept, then he's got a technical argument on his hands, when he actually wants to make a cultural argument about the effects of regulating p2p on a conceptual level.
By this I mean that, in the case of information systems, one argument that LL and SV must prove is that, beyond the technical specifications and use-value of such systems, that they promote and provoke information exchange as a form of public discourse. In other words, the files we send through the network are not simply valued as data or objects, they are valued as discourse. "Human deliberations," as SV puts it - and, as such, our understanding of self really takes shape as a function of the media we work with. So, while SV attempts to understand regulation as technology and p2p as tool, SV also wants p2p as discursivity and regulation as embodied by specific technologies. So there are series of mediations: between these antinomies, concepts and tools, practices and ideals. The tension rises out of SV's desire for mediation at these levels and the presence of "unmediated communication" - when the software and hardware level disappears, how do we understand deliberation as a function of technology, and how do we develop and foster critique? This is the original point of the digital literacies concept: how do we make the rules and negotiations of discourse apparent while engaging in discourse itself?