A few days ago when I was talking about getting the N810, I also mentioned that you could go mobile without wifi by pairing to a bluetooth device with a data plan. So somehow and suddenly I found myself chatting up the clerk at T-Mobile about doing just that (notice I was not at ATT talking non-chalantly about an i-phone). I’m trying to get quality mobile internet as inexpensively as possible.
As the story goes, I wind up telling him that what I need is the 39.99 unlimited data plan with a dumb phone that has bluetooth. “14 days,” he says, and then tags on “baby.” This was a nice guy from the hard part of thed Bronx who’d just migrated to Brooklyn. Good thing that the company gives you a coupla weeks when signing a new contract.
I get home, jack up the data packets, pair the two devices … and … And … And …. And
And nothing but a series of ands. Ba-su-da. Is that what you get for trying to get by on the cheap?
Just got my internet tablet Nokia N810. This is a short message using the Wordpress editor for the tablet that I just downloaded from the meamo site. My feelings are a little mixed about the device, but generally so far so good.
Tomorrow starts two full days of orientation, and believe it or not, I’ve been asked to speak about blackboard. (Don’t ask.) I guess I’ll wake up a little early and putg something together last minute. More soon.
I’ve been doing some research on having an ultra portable computer to have on the go. A while back, Collin mentioned that he had purchased the Nokia N800 , and I thought it would be the best solution to fit my needs. At the same time, I’ve been wanting to get the iphone, but I still have a year left on my Verizon contract and getting the iphone would mean that I’ll be dropping 300 bucks plus having to sign up for an unlimited data plan. Since moving to NY, I’ve been thinking about switching out to AT&T anyway, but I can’t justify making that move quite yet.
Just about two months after we renewed our Verizon contract in Texas, I lost my LG VX8300, a phone I thought would serve me well for a couple of years. I liked it very much, bought the multimedia kit, installed music, and generally exploited its many features.
Consequently, I had to return to my old phone and have been using it ever since. Released in 2004, my LG VX4500 cell phone is a sad state of affairs. I can text, talk, download ringtones, and that’s about it. Cutting edge for 04.
Talking and texting is fine on this phone, but what I would like in a mobile device is simply the internet. Over the past year or so, I’ve been migrating as much work and files as I can onto the web platform. I’ve become quite dependent on the various google applications, including docs and notebook that I use constantly. So, the issue was pay the early termination fee at Verizon and go on to pick up a PDA and a new contract at ATT or T-Mobile OR get the Nokia N800 or N810 and keep using my current cell till the contract expires.
Seems like an easy enough choice, right? Still, the difference between the two lies in the data plan. If you’re using a smart phone to access the Internet, it’s on all the time. To access the net on the Nokia, like a laptop, you need a wifi connection. Since I’m going to be riding the Staten Island Ferry daily to work, I need to be able to work (and access my online files) during that time in the morning. (The ferry terminal is hot, but not the ferry.) Now, the Nokia also allows you to access cellular broadband through a bluetooth connection to your PDA. Grrr. See how this leads to a circle? I came a hair away from getting a T-Mobile Dash and signing an Internet only data plan with T-Mobile for 39.99 just so I could pair it with my N810. Ridiculous!
Then, after I already purchased the N810, I find out that Nokia has released the N810 with Wi-Max. Wi-Max stands for Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave Access, and basically, after the infrastructure is in place, it’ll make a city hot. I could be wrong, but it seems to me that this is going to be the next step in internet connectivity, but it’s going to take some time. NYC isn’t yet fitted, so no point in rushing to get the Wi-Max version. So, this is where I stand: the N810 will be arriving in a couple of days. I’ll be able to use it in place of a laptop and carry it around in my pocket. I can usually find free hot spots in my nabe and in Manhattan. After I get it and use it for a while, I’ll see how badly I need to have cellular access (the ferry question), and make my decision then. Lastly, here’s a Youtube review on the device.
One of the primary reasons I wanted to do the Watson Conference this year was catch Paul Miller, aka, DJ Spooky, that Subliminal Kid. What other reason is there to haul down to Kentucky? As it so happens, DJ Spooky canceled. Boooo! I was checking out the one line descriptions last night, and, still, it looks to be a very promising conference nonetheless. I’ve never gone to Watson (I actually didn’t even hear about it till last year), but the list of speakers is strong enough that I’d want to go even without.
Here’s a list of the featured sessions:
Featured Speakers
The 2008 Conference, The New Work of Composing, will follow previous Watson Conferences in alternating plenary sessions with concurrent sessions.
Plenary Session I-New Perspectives on Technology, Media, and Communication:
Andrew Feenberg- Canada Research Chair in Philosophy of Technology in the School of Communication, Simon Fraser University
N. Katherine Hayles- Distinguished Professor of English, University of California, Los Angeles
Lev Manovich- Professor of Visual Arts, Universtiy of California, San Diego
Richard Miller- Chair and Professor of English, Executive Director of the Plangere Writing Center, Rutgers University
Plenary Session III-Access and Agency:
Valerie Kinloch- Assistant Professor of Adolescent Literacy and English Education, The Ohio State University
David Kirkland- Assistant Professor of English Education, New York University
Joe Lambert- Executive Director, Center for Digital Story Telling
Omar Wasow-PhD Candidate in African American Studies and Political Science at Harvard University and Co-founder of BlackPlanet.com
Plenary Session IV-Text and Image:
W.J.T. Mitchell- Professor of English and Art History, University of Chicago.
Diana George- Professor of English and Director of Composition, Virginia Tech
Anne Wysocki- Associate Professor of English, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
Plenary Session V-The New Work of Composing: A Roundtable on Teaching, Scholarship, and Administration:
Jonathan Alexander- Associate Professor of English and Campus Writing Coordinator, University of California, Irvine
Cheryl Ball- Assistant Professor, Illinois State University
Scott DeWitt- Associate Professor of English, Director of the Digital Media Project, The Ohio State University
Bump Halbritter- Assistant Professor, Director of the MSU Documentary Lab, Michigan State University
Charles Kostelnick-Professor and Chair of English, Iowa State University
Andrea Lunsford- Louise Hewlett Nixon Professor of English and Director of the Program in Writing and Rhetoric, Stanford University
Of course, Kate Hayles and Lev Manovich are very big draws. I’ve kept up with Hayles over the years and read My Mother Was A Computer a couple of years ago. Though How We Became Posthuman was an award winner and all that, particularly as it brought discussions of cybernetics to the humanities, conceptually, My Mother was a Computer is a better book, particularly through her discussions of embodiment and information. She corrects her earlier alignment with the Donald McKay strand of first order cybernetics and recognizes that the disembodied information transmission in Claude Shannon’s theories remove the phenomenological subject from the center of the situation. By taking the set of possible situations and connotations out of the equation (unlike Mckay), my take is that Shannon is a stronger believer in chance and randomness. By multiplying the total set of possible messages that can be transmitted and ignoring how a user might need those messages to suit his or her desires, Shannon’s model opens the possibility of connection through multiplicity, a step towards emergence theories. McKay is caught in interpretation, a problem that situates the human in the center of situation and reveals a desire for stability and control. Those who follow Mark Hansen in media theory would recognize Hansen’s arguments about embodiment and his alignment with McKay, but Hansen’s embodiment, the way I read it, is just another word for the subject, since for him, the body is the site of the origin of information.
Oh, well, I guess I felt like I needed to get that off my chest. I have a long section on this in my book, and you can read about it more when it comes out (not anytime soon–no contract yet). I haven’t read Hayles’ new book Electronic Literature, but from the back of the book, you can see that Hayles is now arguing that neither the body nor machines should be given theoretical priority. I like this better though I’d push harder to make strong distinctions between the body and the subject. In A Counter-History of Composition: Towards Methodologies of Complexity, rhetoric’s own Byron Hawk handles this well.
Since the Language of New Media, i haven’t really kept up with Manovich’s work. Much of what he’s done has been with other writers and he’s been doing a lot of digital stuff. A lot of the other names are familiar and their talks should be interesting, but the conference itself has tons of great people. My own paper is going to be on how virtual forms of temporality are actualized through Web 2.0, and how we can channel these temporalities that are already structuring our lifeworld as open-ended starting places for writing new media.
or those who don’t remember a similar title published in JAC some years back, mine riffs off of Victor Vitanza’s “Why the Wasteland Grows”
A friend who may or may not be reading this post and i were talking the other day, complaining and wishing and sharing our common ground about teaching with another. My friend said that he’d be happy if his students could sustain critical thinking in their papers, even if their views were ones that he disagreed with. Of course, since my friend incorporates political issues into the classroom, he was talking about students who come to the U with undeveloped ideas about whatever issue and his desire was that if they could only express themselves well and _critically_, if they, in other words, could formulate arguments that exhibited critical thinking, he would be pleased, even if those arguments were misguided. At least, he seemed to say, they would be able to express themselves critically.
My buddy’s scenario, his desire for his students to exhibit “critical thinking” is understandable and well-intentioned. Moreover, there is nothing unique here about this position. Everybody at the U wants students to think critically.
But teachers who want their students to exhibit critical thinking are not exhibiting it themselves. The term itself “critical thinking” is void, a catchall that allows anyone to claim that they value something that has some (sometimes strong, sometimes weak) degree of marketplace currency. When someone says, I value critical thinking, all s/he is saying is “I recognize that you will likely give some degree of weight to the term critical thinking and I want you to know that you and I share the same values.” There is nothing wrong when someone says that s/he values the same thing that you do, but by using the term “critical thinking” exhibits precisely that you do not value the other. “Critical thinking” refers to the nebulous netherworld that no-one inhabits and that no one defines. Were I Bill O’Reilly, I could probably land a job teaching communications or something at a University. If I had that big of a name, I’d land a job if I wanted to sacrifice my 7 digit salary for a 5 digit one. The name itself would bring in the students. Bill O’Reilly would proclaim to teach critical thinking and would pride himself on doing so.
And if our students could speak as competently as Bill O’Reilly would we be happy, would we think that we’ve left our students better equipped to deal with the madnesses and the joys of this lifeworld? As we are at this juncture, we do not agree on what might be madness, on what might be joy. Who would we be if we practiced an ethics of schizophrenia as Deleuze and Guattari do? Would we then be critical thinkers, the same as Bill O’Reilly? Or would Bill struggle to make sense of that which he could only ridicule, fail to understand, and hire pseudo-academics to rebuff? If we don’t even know the difference between madness and joy, how can we be sure that we can articulte the difference between criticality and non-criticality. And some of us, there is little doubt, would find stronger critical thinking in Bill O’Reilly than in the best of thinkers, those who followed language, epistemology, ontology, technics. No doubt, some of us would find Bill the better thinker–for it is he, we would say, that we can understand.
In this situation, the one who did not think critically, the one who lives according to bromides and platitudes held up by a failure to challenge the foundations holding up a weak belief system, would be the critical thinker, for we “can get” Bill. We can relate. He talks about things that we understand. We can get that making fun of a gay guy is just innocent play and not a symptom of cultural homophobia. We understand teasing, but we don’t connect with cultural symptoms. But because Bill is understood, because he is that with which we identify, then Bill is closer to our sense of critical thinking because we can relate.
This has nothing to do with critical thinking. I’ll take a dare: most of your students parents don’t want you to teach them critical thinking. And I’ll hedge another bet: neither do your administrators. Nobody wants a critical thinker, and it’s because they don’t that the term is allowed to exist. Anyone who uses it, by anti-definition, doesn’t practice it.
Should we assist students in gaining the ability of expression that would result in a failure of understanding? It’s never ok to give students the pragmatic tools to express what’s a mistake. Stanley Fish be damned. You can’t separate an ethics from writing.
Sure, things are desperate. If not, then no such title. But blog posts should do a couple of things, things that are often in competition with each other. A blog post should, on the one hand, riff off the fingers, and, as a quick way of updating and keeping events current for family and friends, should fly through into the internet and be done, but on the other hand, a post, as it should be interesting and related to the niche within which it inhabits should also be written well, carefully thought out and planned. Maybe this is why so many postmodern scholars I know forego the post and focus their attentions on the article. Why do blog post get neglected? Why don’t the posts get rattled off with ease and flair simultaneously? Why do blogs sit for three weeks without being updated? Why do we look at our blogs and cringe and curse ourselves for not posting? What need, what modernist nostalgia lies withing our desires for the post. Why don’t we ants of the internet succeed at our desires for not mattering in the larger community? But why not lie and why must we not wait?
I cannot extricate myself from the violence, the arbitrary and inappropriate nature that the grading mark creates. It is required for my position. But I hope to mitigate that violence to the best I am capable. Removing my assessment as the authoritative ruling power is one way to do this. There are certainly others, but this one works well for the composition course. After all, what are we trying to teach these students? I care very little if they can write for me, and thereby receive what I consider to be a mark of ‘A’. There are many excellent scholars whom would not receive such a mark in my class and it is certain that I would fair similarly in their course. What I care a great deal about is if the student is able to enter into a discourse community, are they capable of reading the texts in that community carefully and rigorously, and, most importantly, are they capable of articulating a response, opening a dialogue, entering in to discourse within that community. This, to me, seems like the most important thing I can teach them. Not to write in some manner that satisfies the violently homogeneous discourse of ‘academic’ and/or ‘professional’ writing. Rather, I hope to assist them in what ever way I am able to write in a manner that is affective within a particular discourse community, in a manner that opens space up, rather than closes it off; to write in a manner that creates questions, not one that blindly offers solutions at the expense of intellectual rigor.
1. To write is difficult anywhere. In the former USSR, in France, in China, in Brazil. For whom do I write? For the work, says Tsvetayeva. I don’t write in order to be loved, says Clarice Lispector. When I write, I become a thing, a wild beast. A wild beast doesn’t look back when it leaps; doesn’t check that people are watching and admiring. Those who do not become wild beasts when they write, who write to please, write nothing that has not already been written, teach us nothing, and forge extra bars for our cage.
2. But one can write only by losing oneself, by going astray, just as one can love only at the risk of losing oneself, and of losing.
3. The poem is stronger than anything. The poem is stronger than the poet.
4. Free-writings are fragmentary, harrowed, in perpetual deconstruction: suddenly they let out the Scream, the scream that we restrain and have always restrained, the scream at the horror of life; they flit across
broad daylight by the light of dream, a light we can bear only at night, they crush us with light, they follow neither road nor line, they explode into notes, they stagger forward, swallowing words in their haste, make mistakes, correct themselves, repent, leap, sweep down between the lines like gulls, there is a dry, violent wind blowing on this land, oh yes, they cut our moorings at once, they are an invitation to the flood. Come, they say, sink with me and I will resuscitate you. Ah, they make our heads spin. And we hate them or adore them. There they are: they slip between our fingers, they pass over us rolling their crowns of fire, they escape us, astral vessels at incalculable speed–is he still human who wrote this man sentence?
“The raw word, thus to dispute the raw with it, as if I first liked to raise it, and the word raise, the poker play is only my mother’s, as if I valued it so as to get into a fight with it about what raw language means, as if I were straining till I bled to remind it, for it knows, cur confitemur Deo scienti [why we confess ourselves to God who already knows], what the raw demands of us, thus making it in my language, the other language, the one which has always been running after me, circling me, a circumference that licks me with a flame” (Jacques Derrida, “Circonfessions,” in Geoffrey Bennington and Derrida, Jacques Derrida [Paris, 1991], p. 7).
It is Derrida, who with a spin of the wheel that strikes us like lightning, exceeds himself and us. For writing is much stronger than any of us. That is why we fear it.
5.But in the Society of Crime in which we are citizens of liberty, we do not look each other in the eye-have you noticed?-we avoid looking each other in the eye so that we avoid the risk of seeing ourselves as we are, and being perhaps ashamed or hesitant, or tempted by truth or friendship, in which case our construction would be shaken and deconstructed and that would be the end of our security and our success. To know good and evil, to know the worth of courage, the value of dignity, we must be on both sides. And we must not forget that joy, joy that is freedom, is worth the pain it costs.
Yes, we need both sides, and to know the one through the other. And to learn to find / discover the one in the other. For prison and its bars are quick to grow up in the freedom that gives itself no thought. Only the
thought of prison gives all its splendor to the thought of liberty.
They, who lacked it, they gave us the freedom that we didn’t know how to have . . .they gave us the desire and the duty to be free. We who are free, do we know how to be free, do we think about being free, of
being free, are we helping to expand the realm of freedom on this earth, are we responsible? Do we need a camp, a prison, a war, to free us from our indifference to ourselves and from our fear of others? So that we do not forget our good fortune?
We Who Are Free, Are We Free?
Author(s): Helene Cixous and Chris Miller (Trans)
Source: Critical Inquiry, Vol. 19, No. 2, (Winter, 1993), pp. 201-219
Slight commentary: And despite all of this above, in the States we have something called the process movement, where Peter North has said that we don’t teach writing but we teach writers. In the process configuration, what is written, the power of what will have been written, is always subordinated to the romantic configuration of who has droned the writing. Subordinating to the process is a subordination to the flux of life, but we don’t mean to subordinate to the process, we–those of us who teach writing process–subordinate to the writer’s individual process, to the individual. But we miss the essential difference between the writer and the writing. It is not what does the teacher want (product). And it is still not what does the writer want (process). We still have not begun to ask the question of what does writing want.
