After reading Patti's week 2/11 response I started to post a comment to her blog site specifically, but then thought, in the spirit of turning the course blog into more of a blog, my comments might appropriately fit here. So here they are:

Patti: wow, very thoughtful reflections this week. As I was reading through your response I started thinking to myself, wow, I'm glad Patti stayed in this course and has goals to become a nurse educator. Part of that is because your views (about language and new media) are very open-minded, or "progressive." Unfortunately, not everyone is as open-minded. Language is another historical site of power struggle. Why is English the WE (world English) and not Spanish, you ask? Because the ME (metropolitan English) countries colonized the globe. And think of the recent Pahrump "English only" language battle: It is a fight over the expansion/acceptence of the Spanish language. Those same language conservatives would likey be aghast at talk of teaching "new media" writing vs. good, old-fashioned grammar. (We'll read in a few weeks why direct instruction in grammar can actually be detrimental to the developmet of writing ability.) I'm glad Patti's in the course because she shows a willingness to consider the complexity and variability of writing. She openly wonders about the place of "formal" writing (and there is a place for it), but I feel comforted knowing Patti might be helping future nurses learn how to communicate.

Patti, and a few others, also commented on the difficulties they had reading the Juzwik et al. meta-analysis of writing trends circa 1999-2004, especially compared to reading Yancey's article. Part of that is because, remember, the field of composition studies is multi-modal: the Juzwik et al. article uses the straightforward scientific article format (problem-method-results-discussion), whereas Yancey uses an almost experimental theory/essay format. Perhaps the Jurzwik article is too abstract in terms of intentifying problems without really giving any examples and citations of specific research. Perhaps a review essay, that summarizes a corpus of research would be more useful. But I did want everyone to get a bird's eye view, if you will, of contemporary research concerns and, new to the disucssion, research methods. We also got to talk about the range of journals in the field, which was useful too.

Furthermore, most of you are generally being asked to read differently than you're used to. Most of you are used to reading literature and to a lesser extent literary criticsm. You're not used to reading the scientific article genre, with its heavy use of citation, emphasis on technical specificity, and explication of research method. One trick for reading scientific articles is that you can pay more attention to the results and discussion at the end, and gloss the method section. Generally speaking, if a scientific article is published, it's method is acceptable--at least for our purposes in this class.

Lastly, I thought last night's class was a great mix of discussing the articles, the field in general, and our course itself. I was satisfied with our blog-inspired discussion of the aims of weekly blog responses. As we discussed, the blog needs to be focused on the readings (this would be the "formal" aspect of the assignment) but it can/should be written informally (I'm not grading your blogs for mechanics, for example). The "style" of the blog, as we discussed, is perhaps the gray area. You can critique, but you need to back up your criticism. Your tone should be balanced.

If I had to name the sub-genre of blog we are modeling, I suppose I would call it the academic's research blog. The academic's research blog can reflect more informally than published scholarship, but I would say it still maintains a "public" dimension of respect that one should afford fellow academics. A good example would be Clay Spinuzzi's blog, which is a sort of "this is what I'm reading now" blog. His two most recent book reviews are somewhat critical, so you can compare the level of tact employed by Spinuzzi. Spinuzzi's blog also contains posts related to other aspects of his professional life and some personal posts, and so can yours. I'll likely read the other posts, and maybe comment on them, but your "grade" will be based on your reading posts. (If you want to argue the grade should be based on the whole blog, that's another discussion.) With that said, see if you can find me some "vitriolic" toned academic research blogs...

I also updated the 2-11 notes file in Webcampus based on the in class discussion.

Lastly, did anyone notice we got our first "outsider" comment to our course blog!

-Dr. J