Part of my recent failure to be especially entertaining or enlightening here in the land of Obsolescence has to do with a smallish project that has absorbed increasing amounts of my already skimpy non-teaching, non-committee, non-fretting-about-the-state-of-the-world time:  I’m co-coordinating a colloquium that will take place here at Pomona College October 31-November 2.  This colloquium, entitled “What Is Media Studies?”, is designed not as a conventional academic conference, but rather as an operational think-tank.  The principal speakers will deliver extended addresses, each followed by lengthy open discussions that will include not only the speakers but also other media professionals, artists, teachers, and scholars from the L.A. area and further afield.  We hope that our audience will represent the full spectrum of contemporary media practice, pedagogy, and scholarship, such a conversation might take place the multiple constituencies that comprise media studies, constituencies that revolve in such separate circles that we almost never meet.  What we hope to consider in the course of the colloquium is less what the field of media studies as it currently exists looks like from varying professional perspectives, than how those particular professional perspectives might be applied in defining the discipline, its objects of study, and its pedagogical practices into the future.

Our speakers include:

Richard Burrows, Director of Arts Education, Los Angeles Unified School District;

James der Derian, Professor of International Relations, Brown University; principal investigator, InfoTechWarPeace; author of Virtuous War: Mapping the Military-Industrial-Media-Entertainment Network;

Meaghan Morris, Professor and Chair of the Department of Cultural Studies at Lingnan University, Hong Kong;

Peter Rawley, producer, CEO of EKR Strategies, and former Executive Vice President and Head of International Department, International Creative Management (ICM);

Tim Rutten, columnist, “Regarding Media,” and former city bureau chief, metro reporter, editorial writer, assistant national editor, Opinion editor and assistant editor for the Editorial Page, Los Angeles Times;

Viola Shafik,* professor, American University of Cairo; author of Arab Cinema:  History and Cultural Identity;

Jesus Salvador Trevino, Chicano civil rights activist, writer, producer, and director.

If any of you out there will be in the L.A. area that weekend, I hope you’ll consider joining us.  E-mail me for more info.

*Given the increasing instability in the region, Prof. Shafik may be joining us via video, rather than in person.

ogged dropped me a line this morning pointing me to a discussion taking place over at Crooked Timber this morning about the potential conflicts between class blog projects and the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA).  Eszter, who originated the discussion, suggests that the provisions of this act might be used to say that class blogs cannot be public, because FERPA prohibits educational institutions from releasing student information, possibly including information about what courses students are enrolled in (and, by implication, the presence of a student posting on a course blog reveals their* enrollment status).

Ezster goes on to argue that, should course blogs be forced to retreat from the public sphere, most of what is good about them would be lost.  Indeed, one of my key goals over at The Literary Machine this semester is asking my students to see what happens when they write in an environment that is not simply machine-mediated, but public.  One possible solution, suggested in the comments, is allowing students to post under pseudonyms (but requiring that they distribute those pseudonyms to other members of the class).

None of these issues occurred to me as I started up the blog—just as none of them occurred to me when I had students participate in any number of other web-based projects in the past.  Are there other such ethical concerns that we ought to be thinking through about the relationship between blogging and the classroom?

*Via Languagehat, a defense of the singular “they.”

As you know, I have a new iPod.  (No, this is not another gloating entry.)

I have also had for a while now an eMusic account.

I have no facility, however, for keeping up with the music the kids are listening to these days, particularly that indie scene that seems to exist just beneath my radar.  (Which might, of course, be intentional, as I’m well into the realm of those Hoffman said not to trust.)

Anyhow, here’s what I’m seeking:  suggestions of bands I might like.  The genies at eMusic keep recommending the same stuff to me over and over again, and I want something new.  Here’s a quick list of a few things I’ve snagged that I’ve really liked:

Cat Power, You Are Free
The Decemberists, Castaways and Cutouts
Apples in Stereo, Fun Trick Noisemaker
Belle and Sebastian, If You’re Feeling Sinister

I’ve also gotten turned on to The Notwist, Neutral Milk Hotel, and Sarge.  So who else should I be listening to?

I finally got my hands on my new iPod this morning, after a series of nail-biting delays.  I’d paid for the two-day express shipping when I ordered it, and it shipped on September 12, so I’d expected to have it by the middle of last week, and certainly in time to have slick music portability for this past weekend’s trip to Louisiana.

What I did not take into consideration was, first, that the iPod was shipping from China.  That Airborne’s recent merger with DHL had resulted in, not more efficient overseas shipping service, but total discombobulation.  That DHL/Airborne would ship the iPod from China, through the Port of Los Angeles, to their distribution center in Fresno, to the local branch in Ontario, and then on to me.  And, finally that, upon encountering an shipping address that appeared to be unavailable due to construction, one with clearly posted signs redirecting deliveries, rather than actually redirecting the delivery, or even calling to ask what’s what, Airborne would opt instead to return the package as undeliverable.

In a fit of what I can only describe as “pique,” I sent a very terse e-mail message to the Apple Store’s customer service folks, telling them how displeased I was with the situation, after which I got on the phone with Airborne and attempted to have the package redelivered.  Half an hour after sending the e-mail message, I had a response from Apple, telling me not only that they would refund the amount of the two-day shipping charges (which refund appeared on my credit card the same day) but that they had contacted Airborne and gotten a commitment that the iPod would arrive the next day.

Which it did—two hours after I flew out of town.  Apple, 1; Airborne, 0.

I’m forced to admit, however, that it was worth waiting for.  The packaging itself is worth seeing—to the extent that I really wish I had a digital camera so I could post some pictures of this box, or at least better pictures than the images I found of the 30GB version’s packaging.  The basic package is a cube, the outer vertical edges of which are wrapped in a thin cardboard sleeve.  Slide off the sleeve, and the cube splits in half; fold the top half over to the left so that it sits beside the bottom half, and each of the interior faces opens to reveal the neatly packed iPod, dock, and other accessories.

Once unpacked, I plugged one end of the FireWire cable into the dock and the other into my Powerbook, and then put the iPod in the dock.  iTunes started automatically and brought up a dialogue box in which I was asked to name the iPod, and after clicking OK, the program automatically transferred my music library.  No hassles; no settings; just did it.

It took just a minute or so to figure out how to use the iPod as a FireWire disk and how to sync my contacts and calendar to it.  It’s certainly no replacement for a PDA (happily, I have another toy for that purpose), but it’s nice to have the extra backup.

Enough gloating.  Suffice it to say I’m happy.

Some of you may have noticed the new link that appeared a couple of days ago, unannounced, under “Other Obsolescence.” I’m happy to make the announcement, if belatedly, that my class blog is up and running, having overcome the technical obstacles that were preventing its debut.  The blog is group-authored, and my students have been instructed that they should make at least one front-page post each week, and should comment on at least two of their peers’ posts as well.

The course they’re enrolled in, entitled, appropriately enough, The Literary Machine, has as its focus the different representations of and experimentations in the interface between computers and writers.  We’re thus studying some cybernetic (print) fiction, a good bit of new media theory, and electronic texts of hypertextual and other varieties.  But it was important to me that my students experience this negotiation of the computerized writing environment directly—that they not merely study the relationship through its representations, but also through its enactment.

All this by way of saying that they’ve been told to consider the ways that their writing changes when—among other kinds of shift—they are suddenly writing for an audience that is much larger than, well, me.

I hope that you’ll stop by, see what they have to say, and contribute to the discussion.

From the good people who brought you Badgers Badgers Badgers Badgers MUSHROOM MUSHROOM, comes the inexplicably-titled Scampi.

Warning:  make sure your volume’s not too high.

More Important Warning:  the new tune may never leave your brainspace, once admitted.

From Rory comes the Victorian Boy’s Guide to Blogging.  Go forth and read it yourself, with the first verse below to entice you:

The nicely tended weblog
Should every rise and ebb log
Of its author’s ever-changing mood:
His transient obsessions
And Rousseau-like confessions;
And once or twice a link just might intrude.
Choose your subject well,
And then proceed to tell
Everything you know: about, say, Food.
A dozen posts should do–
Then on to pastures new.
It matters not, provided it’s not lewd.
(What’s that? See here now, sir,
Don’t cater to one browser;
It doesn’t matter how on earth it’s viewed.)

About what follows—well, let me just say that there’s a gorgeous a/nother enjambment in verse two that absolutely set my heart a-flutter.

Happy consumerist techno-geek advice, that is.

Is there any particular reason you can think of that I shouldn’t buy myself an iPod?

Or perhaps you might want to help talk me into it.  In which case:  40GB?  Or the less profligate 20GB?

Oh, the irony:  at roughly the same moment that I was calling somone out in the Invisible Adjunct’s comments for what I took to be the implicit suggestion that professors at small liberal arts colleges exist in an intellectual backwater (a suggestion implicit, I think, in the assumption that such SLAC profs are able to take a more leisurely approach to research because we aren’t held to the same tenure standards as those at research institutions), I was being called out over at making contact for having made what seem like precisely the same suggestions about faculty whose 4-4 (and worse) loads make “the act of producing scholarship” one precariously squeezed into an insanely full schedule.

As I admit in my mea culpa in Cindy’s comments, this blind spot, I think, says more about my own concerns about the locus of scholarly production than anything; I never meant to suggest that only the writing of books or articles could keep one sufficiently alive intellectually to warrant one’s continued presence in the classroom.  Cindy points out that the many regular and contingent faculty members whose labor makes the existence of the rock-stars possible nonetheless “[find] the time to read the journals in our disciplines, chat with each other about our pedagogy and the content of our fields, and continually refine what we are doing in our classrooms.” And of course, she’s absolutely right.

This slip of mine really gives me pause.  The origin of my equation of scholarly work and scholarly production is internal, and has everything to do with anxieties about the role of such work in my own life:  I had to remind myself all the way through writing my dissertation—and still have to remind myself, as I’m doing research—that reading, and talking, and listening, and thinking, are important forms of knowledge-production, despite the fact that not all of this work resulted in writing.

And thus the question gets raised yet again, in another form, of what counts as work in academic lives, what we claim to value versus what we actually reward.

The conversation about professorial personas, professional ethics, and blogging continues over at weezBlog, where Elouise considers the question of virtual fraternization—students reading professors’ blogs and vice versa.  One of her commenters responds (copying his earlier post to Wealth Bondage, which, as Elouise notes, contains an indignation arising from that original conversation) by pointing out the level of control that students have over professors’ success, by virtue of paying tuition and reviewing class performances.  Much of this entry originates in my ensuing comment.

I will confess that the consumerist model of education—implicit in the sense that students pay the salaries that we as professors receive—sets my teeth on edge.  Part of that has to do with my institution, a small liberal arts college that prides itself on its adherence to a model of education that seems really outdated in this McDonaldized nation:  we focus on one-on-one contact (professional contact, that is) between faculty and students, on discussion, and on a sense that learning is a goal in and of itself, rather than preparation for the job market.

And part of it is the sense that my profession—my vocation—and the ideals that many of us espouse are being insulted in this conflation with the service industry.  No, students are not waiters (an analogy that the commenter takes issue with, but one that originated in the Wealth Bondage post)—but neither are professors.  We don’t want to deliver credentials (or even knowledge) in response to a financial transaction.  What we hope is that students are there because they honestly want to learn—and as it happens, we’ve already studied the stuff they’re now studying.  This gives us a certain edge in our relationship, one that most of us use generously, giving to the institution and our students far more than we receive in financial compensation, because the other kinds of compensation we get—like satisfaction in seeing a student grow, and think, and understand more deeply than he or she did before—make it all worth it.

Yeah, start the violins.  I’m weepy now, just thinking of my altruism.  But I stand by what I’ve said, sappy or not.

About the question of fraternization, though:  the IRL kind is risky, for the reasons that Elouise and several of her commenters note (difficult to use one’s authority with a pal; too easy to abuse one’s power with a subordinate; even easier to be perceived as doing one or the other by one’s peers, who are really the ultimate arbiters of one’s job security).  The virtual kind, I’m still unsettled about.  I know I’ve got at least a couple of students who read my blog, but only a few have left comment-footprints.  I wonder, as George does on his site, though:  has my writing changed since my students have found the site?  Do I self-censor?  If so, in what ways, and why?  What parts of my writing self would I not want my students to see?

So, those of you students who are reading—pipe up.  Let me know you’re out there.  And if you’ve got a blog—do you want me reading it?  What would you change if you knew that I were?