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institution, a small liberal arts college that prides itself on its adherence to a model of education that seems really outdated in this McDonaldized nation:  we focus on one-on-one contact (professional contact, that is) between faculty and students, on discussion, and on a sense that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?

I realized today that over the last weeks, I’ve begun a series of thoughts here that I haven’t fully followed through on—too appropriately, the thoughts seem to obsolesce before they hit the input screen.  My Gibson re-reading, for instance:  I found myself making mental notes of possible entries as I read, but then I kept getting sidetracked by other, apparently more interesting topics.

So, two random follow-ups.

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I’ve been away for a bit (as those of you reading this—and I quote—“US person’s boring memoirs about his travel trips” (ahem) already know), and since I’ve been back, I’ve been caught in the thick of semester start-up:  first-year advising, grading placement exams, preparing for the first day of classes, and generally attempting to get reacclimated.  So I’ve missed some things, over the last two weeks, particularly a great series of posts by both George and Elouise about the relationship between the professorial persona, or at least the imagined version thereof, and the personas we adopt online, in these semi-veiled but nonetheless public conversations.

Well.  I find myself flabbergasted by the turn this conversation has taken, a turn that does nothing, in my mind, but highlight exactly the issues that George and Elouise were pointing to in the first place.

It began simply enough:  George wondered how his students might respond to finding his blog online, and whether his knowledge that some of them might be reading his musings would alter the nature of his writing.  This is a question that resonates for me; the first time a student of mine appeared in my comments, my heart did skip a beat.  But that appearance was one of the factors that made me seriously reconsider what I was up to here, and which gave me the courage to unmask, to acknowledge that yep, it’s me, out here where I can be seen, and yep, I take this thing seriously.  Elouise seems to have gone through much the same process, and has—way more bravely than I, I think—found ways to face the risks of being seen in all (or at least many) of her facets by those who have only come to know her in one.

But it’s a hard choice to make, deciding to let down the shields that protect us in the classroom, to drop the professor-persona and allow students to see us as fully human, warts and all.  And so I absolutely sympathized, and agreed, when Liz suggested a private forum, a support group of sorts, in which blogging profs could talk about such issues in relative safety.

What ensued demonstrates exactly the reason that such a forum would be useful, and may be necessary.  Liz’s suggestion was taken, both in the comments on her blog, the comments on Elouise’s, and—most hurtfully, given the ad hominem nature of the attacks there—on Wealth Bondage, as evidence of elitism, of a desire to close students out of a conversation fundamentally about them.  Which, it seems to me, it was not:  it was a self-protective gesture, a desire to reveal one’s vulnerabilities in a safe place.  The furious result, and the bruised response—see George’s response today, as well as Matt’s—are precisely evidence of the dangers of stepping outside one’s perceived persona in this new, at times too-public, space.

The internet cafe is a lovely thing—not this particular one, I mean, but the general development.  Give the folks behind the counter one unit of the local currency, and receive in exchange some quantity of time on a high-speed connection, to catch up with what you need to catch up with.  Today, the currency is pounds sterling, and the unit of time is an hour, which seems to me generous in the extreme.

So, since I have time to burn, a moment from my day:  I finally got to see in person three paintings that I’ve stared at for hours in reproduction—Holbein’s The Ambassadors and two Rembrandt self-portraits (the portrait of the artist as successful bourgeois, from his thirties, and the portrait of the artist as old and tired, from his sixties).  It took me a while to remember that the primary locus of the reproductions at which I spent so much time staring was John Berger’s Ways of Seeing.  And then I wandered around for an hour or so, caught in a brain-loop in which I attempted to reason out the import of my being so moved by seeing the originals of works I’d previously seen in reproduction in a text so underwritten by Benjamin’s dismissal of the aura of originality and the mystification it wreaks.

And then I decided that I’m still jet-lagged, and cut myself some slack in the figuring-it-out department.

Anyway:  National Gallery, Trafalgar Square, Whitehall, Lambeth Bridge, South Bank, Hungerford Bridge, Charing Cross, Piccadilly Circus, Regent Street, Oxford Street, Baker Street, Marylebone.

It’s been a day.

Why is it that folks who find Planned Obsolescence via net searches mostly show up in the wee hours of the night?

And why are they searching for:

- what’s after postmodernism

- none of us is as dumb as all of us

- times roman

- helen ludo or genius or brilliant or smart “last samurai”

- rick moody, opinions

- advance reading

- on leave in academia

- intuitionist book summer reading

- greenblatt mla tenure book

- unspoken helen “sports night”

- verizon can you hear me now?

That last is my favorite.  I get an average of a hit a day off those commercials.  And always around 3 am.

Having finished with the statement, and returning to the Gibson article, I’ve made the last-minute decision to accompany the Significant Other on his business trip to London.  I’ll be blogging from there next week, while I reread Pattern Recognition, which combination seems wholly appropriate.

It makes me curious, though:  I began this blog during a trip to Hawaii.  George recently blogged his trip to Georgia, as well as his experiences at the SHARP conference here in Claremont.  And of course Rory has blogged his way around the world.  So what is the relationship between the blog, the place it resides, and the space its author currently inhabits?  How do we register or imagine or understand movement within the blogosphere (awful word), and movement of the blogosphere within lived space?

For years I’ve nagged my students to adopt a more critical eye toward the work they turn in to me, to refuse to be content with the first draft, to step back, take a breath, and attempt a real re-vision of their writing.  Writing is rewriting, was the mantra we chanted back in the faculty development workshops in the Expository Writing Program.

So I’ve been watching with interest and a bit of befuddlement the debate surrounding the blog-entry-revision question:  Jill Walker first drew my attention to it with her post on the ethics of entry deletion, which references the brouhaha between Mark Pilgrim and Dave Winer over Winer’s sense of his blog’s malleability (and Pilgrim’s sense that this malleability was the result of a lack of accountability).  Jonathon Delacour (link via mamamusings) recounts his own change of heart with regard to the question of ethical blog-permanence, thinking through in great detail the points at which his own principles diverge from those laid out by Rebecca Blood.  And Chuck Tryon rightly notes that this debate bears some import for those of us who use blogs in the classroom.

The question that I’m left with, though, is how to balance my dedication to the practice of rewriting with my sense that the blog is and ought to be a relatively permanent record of a moment’s thoughts.  This, I think, may be at the root of one of the difficulties I’ve encountered with this site:  I’m fairly cautious, by nature, about releasing my words into the public sphere.  I’ve been a long-term lurker on a number of listservs, but never a regularly active participant, because the form always seemed to me to move so much more quickly than my own thought- and writing-processes do.  I’ve only begun commenting recently on a number of blogs that I’ve been reading for months.  And I’m always nervous at that moment when I change my MT post status from “Draft” to “Publish.”

Clearly I’ve got the sense that my words, once out there (once “published”), are on the record, permanentesque in the way that the web has become.  (Yes, pages are deleted and links are removed every day.  But with the existence of the Google cache, has that removal become illusory?) But I still feel the need to convince my students that the first draft of anything is rarely right, and that no piece of writing should be considered finished.  (Ask Joyce Carol Oates about that one.)

So how do we reconcile this?  Are certain kinds of writing bound to a greater degree of permanence than others?  Should the class blog adhere to blogly standards of accountability or pedagogical standards of revision and rewriting?

A weekend post by Liz Lawley returned me to my recent thoughts about how to integrate a group-authored blog into my fall class on the Literary Machine.  Liz has ingeniously leveraged MovableType’s calendar-based entries as a replacement for those clunky, kludgy, commercial course management packages.

There was a bunch of buzz last month among a number of bloggers pondering the expansion-of-MT-beyond-the-blog:  Rory worked through the MT naming-conventions problem in order to create and maintain other parts of his site via MT; Matt Haughey explored the potential for site management created by MT’s database-driven structure; see also Brad Choate, Doug Bowman, and even—sorta—Jason Kottke.

In terms of course management systems, my campus has started experimenting with Moodle, an open-source (and less clunky, and less miserably interfaced) option, which I’ll be using in both my fall classes.  What I’d love, though, would be some way to tie Moodle and MT together:  integration of (public, multi-author) course blog and (private, single-author) course materials, a synthesis of the professorial aspects of the class (assignments, readings, etc.) and the student-driven aspects (discussion, presentations, etc.).

… sort of.

We rolled back northward from SIGGRAPH yesterday, a bit dazed yet from the sensory overflow of the conference and the tradeshow.  I’m not sure that I’m quite done processing what I’ve picked up this week (including participating in a couple of quickie Apple Pro Training sessions on Shake 3 and DVD Studio Pro 2, catching a number of demos of other forthcoming and recently updated software and hardware packages, and watching a slew of new animation).  In fact, I’m pretty sure that I haven’t, as I find myself at a complete loss as I try to piece together some kind of report.  I’ve got some partly-formed ideas, though (particularly about the puzzling relationship between interactivity and presentation that the conference reveals), that I’ll hope to solidify over the weekend.  Watch this space as we (attempt to) return to normal programming on Monday.

In the meantime, I’ve got reading to finish, and an article that I think I might finally have a handle on to write, and there is that ominous breeze I’m feeling against the back of my neck as the calendar pages flip mercilessly toward September…

Today’s second installment of what has apparently become an ongoing feature brings us further advisories, in over the transom:

THE UNCERTAINTY PRINCIPLE IS UNTENABLE

By re-analysing Heisenberg’s Gamma-Ray Microscope experiment and the ideal experiment from which the uncertainty principle is derived, it is actually found that the uncertainty principle can not be obtained from them. It is therefore found to be untenable.

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