Language

Understanding Shakespeare is the B.A. thesis project of Stephan Thiel at the Interfacedesign program of the University of Applied Sciences in Potsdam.

Its goal is to introduce a new form of reading drama to help understand Shakespeare’s works in new ways.

It also changes our conventional ways of "consuming" narratives and knowledge using information visualization.

What the group was trying to provide was an overview of the entire play by showing its text through a collection of the most frequently used words for each character. It reminded me of tag clouds.

A scene is represented by a block of text and scaled relatively according to its number of words.

Characters are ordered by appearance from left to right throughout the play. The major character’s speeches are highlighted to illustrate their amounts of
spoken words as compared to the rest of the play.

Now, in a very un-Shakespearean way, you can look at how this project created an application of computational tools that explored in order "to extract and visualize the information found within the text and to reveal its underlying narrative algorithm."

They turned the visualizations into actual prints (90cm x ~220cm) for an exhibition.

I can imagine the purists opposition to this tech view of The Bard, but I applaud all efforts to look at old things in new ways with new tools - even if what it accomplishes is to make us once again value the original.

Paul Meier, a theater professor at the University of Kansas, had his students this semester stage the first-ever American rendition of a Shakespeare play, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, in its original pronunciation.

According to The History Blog, there have only been “three other productions of original pronunciation (OP) Shakespeare before this one, 2 at The Globe theater in London, and 1 at Cambridge in the 1950s.”

The students worked with David Crystal, a linguist and the author of Pronouncing Shakespeare: The Globe Experiment. Crystal worked on a production of Romeo and Juliet at the Globe Theater in London.

You can listen to audio from the Globe performance and watch some video from the student production at KU.

Poet Laureate Kay Ryan announced the Community College Poetry Project, a national poetry project that embraces community colleges through an online poetry page "Poetry for the Mind's Joy" and a poetry-writing contest. (video at the Library of Congress site)

The project, in conjunction with the Community College Humanities Association, also designates April 1 as National Poetry Day on Community College Campuses.

Kay Ryan attended community college at Antelope Valley College in California and, until recently, taught remedial English for more than 30 years at community colleges around her home in Marin County.

"I simply want to celebrate the fact that right near your home, year in and year out, a community college is quietly—and with very little financial encouragement—saving lives and minds," said Ryan. "I can’t think of a more efficient, hopeful or egalitarian machine, with the possible exception of the bicycle."

Ryan added, "It is at a community college that a student can progress all the way from learning to read to learning to read poetry. That is, she can get the basic tools she must have to advance in the world and then go on and use them for the mind’s joy. This is a progression that improves both the student and her community every step
of the way."

Nearly universal literacy is a defining characteristic of today’s modern civilization. Nearly universal authorship will shape tomorrow's.

Nearly everyone reads. Soon, nearly everyone will publish.

Before 1455, books were handwritten, and it took a scribe a year to produce a Bible. Today, it takes only a minute to send a tweet or update a blog.

Rates of authorship are increasing by historic orders of magnitude.

Nearly universal authorship, like universal literacy before it, stands to reshape society by hastening the flow of information and making individuals more influential.

These are thoughts that come from both a research report and analysis from Seed magazine's "A Writing Revolution."  I discovered it on blogs like one by The Atlantic's Andrew Sullivan whose post reposted the chart below:



In that Seed article, they say:

By 2000, there were 1 million book authors per year. One million authors is a lot, but they are only a tiny fraction, 0.01 percent, of the nearly 7 billion people on Earth. Since 1400, book authorship has grown nearly tenfold in each century. Currently, authorship, including books and new media, is growing nearly tenfold each year. That’s 100 times faster. Authors, once a select minority, will soon be a majority.

What does it mean to be a "published author" in this digital world they are describing?

In our analysis, we considered an author’s text “published” if 100 or more people read it. (Reaching 100 people may seem inconsequential, but new-media messages are often re-broadcast by recipients, and then by their recipients, and so on. In this way, a message can “go viral,” reaching millions.)

Do I agree with their analysis? Yes and No. Like Nick Carbone, I question the leap in their example of United Airlines refusing to reimburse a musician for damaging his guitar, and that customer subsequently posting a song online called "United Breaks Guitars” as being the reason that "United’s stock dropped 10 percent."

This blogger also is not totally convinced. Maybe someone needs to examine their sources and methodology.

But, in general, I am with Seed on the idea of a radically changing authorship model that gives a much larger number of people the means to become published authors and actually have a readership that lends some authority to their writing.

Writing is a daily practice for millions of Americans, but few notice how integral writing has become to daily life in the 21st century.  To draw attention to the remarkable variety of writing we engage in, and help make writers from all walks of life aware of their craft, the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) created a National Day on Writing. On October 8 the Senate passed a resolution declaring October 20, 2009, the National Day on Writing. 

Today, a gallery of submitted works will be opened up for everyone to view a wide variety of pieces.  Groups will also be celebrating the day across the country.

http://www.ncte.org/dayonwriting

Yeah, I figured that title might get your attention (or the attention of a search query). Young people today write more than any generation before them. Not something you hear from educators much these days.

Kids today can't write. Right? I think that has been said a lot over the years and over the centuries. The culprit the past 50 years has probably been technology. Movies, TV, videogames, the Internet. Twitter tweets, Facebook status posts, blogs, PowerPoint bullets, text messages.

Not according to Andrea Lunsford, professor of writing and rhetoric at Stanford University. She organized the Stanford Study of Writing to look at college students' prose.

The study looked at about 15,000 student writing samples - in-class writing, formal essays, journal entries, emails, blog posts, and chat sessions.

And what did she find?   "I think we're in the midst of a literacy revolution the likes of which we haven't seen since Greek civilization."

Technology is reviving writing, not killing it. How? Literacy in new directions.

One thing she found was that young people today write more than early generations because they do all that socializing online and most of that involves writing text. Of all the writing that the Stanford students did, a stunning 38 percent of it took place out of the classroom?life writing, as Lunsford calls it.

Okay, she hasn't convinced you.

How about this? Pre-Internet, the claim is that most writing that occurred was because of a school assignment or as part of a job. The Stanford Study students were very adept at kairos.

kairos: The opportune occasion for speech. The term kairos has a rich and varied history, but generally refers to the way a given context for communication both calls for and constrains one's speech. Thus, sensitive to kairos, a speaker or writer takes into account the contingencies of a given place and time, and considers the opportunities within this specific context for words to be effective and appropriate to that moment. As such, this concept is tightly linked to considerations of audience (the most significant variable in a communicative context) and to decorum (the principle of apt speech).  http://rhetoric.byu.edu

Do you agree? Are your students good at assessing audience and adapting their tone and technique to best get their point across? Clive Thompson writing for Wired agrees with the study.

We think of writing as either good or bad. What today's young people know is that knowing who you're writing for and why you're writing might be the most crucial factor of all.

Check out the study at http://ssw.stanford.edu. Then you can post your comments here. Or email Professor Lunsford.

The results of the poll for the Top Language Blogs (which I wrote about in more detail earlier) have been posted. The ones that interest me the most are the Top Ten Language Blogs for "Language Technology" which focuses on blogs discussing technology as part of the language learning process.

No, Serendipity35 did not make the list, but I checked out the top 10 and found a few familiar bloggers and a few new ones to add to my reader. Most of the blogs are not hardcore language blogs but EdTech blogs that discuss language learning at times.

The list reinforces my perception that there are just many more teachers in the K-12 world blogging, creating their own social networks etc. than there are in the higher education world.

I am reading that the University of Arizona is developing a one-credit online writing course that will be used to supplement three-credit GenEd (general education) classes.

It's one way to address a problem a problem that occurs on campuses where enrollment is growing and  the number of staff and the facilities to support them have not increased.

This is true of many writing centers, and they often have problems meeting the increased demand. For better and for worse, online versions are often seen as an economically feasible solution.


At PCCC, we use eTutoring, but we don't have anything like an online writing center. Since our center is only a year old, we are fortunate that our roll out is in phases and that we won't be expected to support the entire community (which would include college-level, basic skills and ESL populations) for three more years.

An online writing course could be viewed as a form of writing across the disciplines. At UA, the course will be introduced as a one-credit supplement to the typical three-credit general education class. It is intended to provide an interactive and self-paced online environment in which students' writing skills are diagnosed and improved.

According to an article on the UA course:

"...the courses will not replace gen-ed classes, but instead will support them with needed writing instruction that is not available in the typical 50 minute lecture period...The online course will offer tutorials on topics in writing not ordinarily covered by professors, such as grammar, drafting a thesis and style and craft.
Writing proficiency will be tested by a diagnostic system that will, depending on the student's score, direct him or her signed to target a given problem area. These modules will feature flash animation and other interactive software tailored to the specific skill level of the student.

Thomas Miller, English professor and associate provost of academic affairs, pointed out that the online course will help deal with problems in writing essays before it's too late. He said that students all too often realize they have significant problems in writing only after their papers are returned with a poor grade. Miller added that research on writing pedagogy shows that "students do not read teachers' comments on their papers. They often do not understand comments they read and do not apply them." The online course is intended to remedy this problem by developing students' writing skills before a paper is even assigned to them.The course will "take them through the writing process," Miller said. "It will help them draft a research question or thesis and will include strategic visits to the writing center."

It's an interesting idea. At PCCC, our approach is to try to incorporate these skills into the GenEd courses. We are designing 20 distinct courses across disciplines as writing-intensive and trying to better equip those faculty to support their students' writing, as well as sending students to our writing center for face-to-face help and sending them online to use eTutoring.

One reason that we chose this path is because we wanted to also include faculty in the learning process. A good part of our initiative effort goes to professional development. We are trying to help faculty improve their ability to create writing assignments, facilitate assessment and utilize technology to do it.

We will probably need to look at putting more online each year because we need to support two small satellite campuses, and our online students.