The second is Chancellor Katehi’s eagerly awaited public response to what happened:

Nope, there’s nothing wrong with your Youtube connection; that’s all she said. I can’t speak for other people in the crowd, but I was hoping for something more than a weak apology and a vague promise to work at making things “better.” If there was a moment for her to try to restore confidence in her administration of the campus, and to avoid having to resign, that was it. And she blew it.

Back? Of course, there’s nothing especially new about this activity, except maybe the use of social media to accomplish it. Teachers have been mocking the efforts of their students since time immemorial. I taught at one university in which some instructors put up a “wall of shame” in the teachers’ staff room, and they posted whole student essays that were, for whatever reason, deemed risible. The department believed this was in bad taste, and had it removed.

I understand why teachers do this. I’ve stared down enough stacks of papers in my time to know how potentially crazy-making it is to grade student writing. You get tired. You get punchy. And then you run across some absurd gem a student has written that forces you either to laugh or cry. At that moment of choice between derision and despair, it’s probably better to laugh at it.

But there’s a difference between laughing to oneself and posting student writing in a public forum for everyone else to see. It’s a bit like getting drunk and posting a bunch of stuff to your Facebook page that, in the cold light of day, shouldn’t really seem all that funny. Or rather, in the case of “Shit My Students Write,” it isn’t funny enough to override the potential danger that a student might find their own writing posted there. Maybe some of them wouldn’t care, but then maybe some of them would.

How would that feel, to find out a teacher of yours has publicly posted something you wrote for the express purpose of mocking you? It’s as if Henry Higgins, not content with stuffing Eliza’s mouth full of marbles and making her “enunciate,” also paraded her through the streets of London and invited passersby to poke fun at her. I don’t think Pickering would have stood for it.

My Fair Lady is an apt analogy for another reason, and that’s the fact that sometimes student writing sucks (to the point of seeming funny) precisely because teachers are asking them to do something new and difficult. Some of the examples on “Shit My Students Write” are surely the result of intense ignorance or laziness, but others may very well be the result of an honest attempt to complete a difficult (or vague) assignment. Students are made vulnerable when we ask them to write, precisely because the gap between where they are and where we want them to be is so very obvious. It takes a certain amount of trust in the teacher, whether warranted or not, for them to turn in anything at all.

Do I think teachers who post (bad) student writing in public forums are monsters? Of course not. But I do think that fewer teachers would do it if they spent more time considering the implications of that act.

But as Yong Zhao and Diane Ravitch point out, the fact that US children aren’t acing international standardized tests isn’t an occasion for panic. Or rather, it’s kind of ridiculous to panic over our performance on those tests, since we’ve been performing about the same on them for the past 50 years. If, as the current administration suggests, there’s a relationship between performance on these tests and prosperity, then why didn’t our economy collapse decades ago? As Ravitch puts it, “there is no logical connection between international test scores and the success of our economy. Our scores have been poor to middling for 50 years, yet we have the greatest economy in the world.”

In other words, US performance on international tests is no cause for alarm. However, that’s not to say everything is fine with our schools. In fact, it’s possible that we are destroying the very things that made us the “greatest economy in the world” in our misguided attempts to raise test scores. Again, Ravitch:

Instead of promoting innovation, creativity and imagination, the current obsession with raising test scores discourages these things. Students are learning to pick the right answer and being penalized for thinking differently. Subjects that spark students’ imagination, like the arts, are being squeezed out of the school week. And some districts plan to develop standardized tests for all subjects, which are guaranteed to do damage to students’ ability to think creatively.

So, the deep, tragic irony is this: What makes America great is its innovation, creativity, and imagination, and yet, in the name of “keeping up” internationally, we’re moving to destroy these very qualities by endlessly testing and retesting our children.

In other words, we’re going the wrong way. With that in mind, here’s an illustrative story, recounted by Yong Zhao:

The king of the state of Wei intends to attack its neighboring state of Zhao. Upon hearing the news, Ji Liang, counselor to the king rushes to see him. “Your Majesty, on my way here, I met a man on a chariot pointed to the north,” Ji Liang tells the King, “and he told me that he was going to visit Chu.”

“But Chu is in the south, why are you headed north?” I asked.

“Oh, no worry, my horses are very strong,” he told me.

“But you should be headed south,” I told him again.

“Not to worry, I have plenty of money,” he was not concerned.

“But still you are headed the wrong direction,” I pointed out yet again.

“I have hired a very skillful driver,” was this man’s reply.

“I worry, your majesty, that the better equipped this man was,” Ji Liang says to the King, “the farther away he would be from his destination.”  “You want to be a great king and win respect from all people,” Ji Liang concludes, “You can certainly rely on our strong nation and excellent army to invade Zhao and expand our territory. But I am afraid the more you use force, the farther away you will be from your wishes.”

Once again, Ikea makes half-assed “prototypes” possible. Before you snicker, though, remember that the point of all this isn’t to find a permanent solution, but instead to sort of test-drive the whole standing desk thing before committing much to it.

Being sedentary for nine hours a day at the office is bad for your health whether you go home and watch television afterward or hit the gym. It is bad whether you are morbidly obese or marathon-runner thin. “Excessive sitting,” Dr. Levine says, “is a lethal activity.”

As an academic who also cares about how long he lives, I find this troubling. It might not surprise you to learn that my daily work as a college faculty member involves more than a fair amount of planting my ass in a chair. Most of the reading, writing, grading, course prep, email correspondence, etc. happens while I’m sitting. Add to that a 3-hour round-trip commute to work, and things don’t look so good for me.

But what if I could do some of my work standing up? The idea of a standing desk isn’t new—apparently, Thomas Jefferson used one—but the idea has been getting more attention recently.  I noticed that Boing Boing‘s (and Make‘s) Mark Frauenfelder was talking about a standing desk prototype, and also linking to what other people are doing, so I got to wondering if it would work for me. However, I didn’t want to sink a bunch of time and money into building (or buying) a standing desk without knowing whether I liked it or not.

So, following Frauenfelder’s idea of simply putting an elevated platform on an existing surface, I stood up and measured the distance from my hands (in typing position) to the top of our dining table (where I often work). I figured I needed something 15 inches tall, so I wandered the house with a measuring tape, and discovered that our Ikea POÄNG footstool fit the bill. Thus I ended up with this no-fuss standing desk prototype:

Of course, this isn’t a permanent solution, but it’s helping me figure out whether a desk like this will work for me, and what my preferences are. I like the incline, for example, but it needs a lip at the end to hold my laptop more securely. I’d also like it to be somewhat narrower, and of course I need to put something on the legs to keep them from scratching the table—because, if I did scratch the table, the question of extending my life might be moot.

It’s totally understandable, of course. In one of my previous lives as a graduate student, I cultivated an ability to “go dark” that puts the efforts of my current students to shame. In fact, after one lengthy period of non-contact with my dissertation advisor, I only emerged (for the last time) to state that I was quitting the program.

The circumstances behind that are, of course, another story altogether, but I relate this part of it only to make this point—going dark is almost never a good thing. Yes, it’s embarrassing to miss deadlines. It’s uncomfortable not to have made as much progress as you would have liked, because this messes with your sense of who you are as a student or scholar or person. It makes you feel inadequate, somehow.

But here’s the problem of going dark: if you’re out of sight, it’s highly likely you’re out of mind. And if the people you’re avoiding aren’t thinking about you, it’s highly improbable they can do anything to help.  Better to lay your cards on the table and see if, together, you can figure out how to move forward. Things may not be as bad as you think. And even if it turns out that nothing can be done, and you are heading toward certain disaster, that’s a terrible thing to have to do alone.

I just got out of a department meeting where we were discussing the possibility of creating a new graduate certificate in the “digital humanities.” I think this is a terrific idea, but I have to admit I’m a bit ambivalent about the term “digital humanities,” partly because there’s some dispute over how to define it.

In a recent post on “The Digital Humanities Divide,” Alex Reid examines the CFP for the 2011 Digital Humanities conference, and finds that a

significant part of the digital humanities that is not captured in this call is the humanistic investigation of digital technoculture: no mention of games studies, social media, or mobile technology. In other words, no mention of the significant digital technologies and practices that are transforming human experience on a global scale. No, instead, we’re going to talk about writing software to analyze hundreds of out of print literary texts that no one can even name.

This aspect of the digital humanities is also reflected in the NEH’s recent call for Digital Humanities Start-up Grants. The call itself presents a fairly wide interpretation of “digital humanities,” but looking over the examples of projects that are getting funded (and based on a second-hand account of a conversation with a grant program officer), it seems like their main priority is on the activity of

planning and developing prototypes of new digital tools for preserving, analyzing, and making accessible digital resources, including libraries’ and museums’ digital assets

For the record, I don’t have anything against making such tools. However, as Reid points out, it seems odd that digital humanists wouldn’t be focused on “the powerful ways that digital technologies are changing the world.”

So, on the one hand, we have some folks saying there should be “more hackety-hack, less yackety-yack,” but on the other we have Neil Postman’s assertion that “technology education is not a technical subject. It is a branch of the humanities.” I think the tension here is not between digital and analogue, but instead in what we think the humanities is for. Is the point of the digital humanities to develop new tools for doing fairly traditional things with a narrow range of privileged texts, or is it to understand something about what it means to be human in a digital age?

That seems to be the question of the week, at least in the teapot-sized universe that is the interwebs. Earlier this week, Slate’s Farhad Manjoo posted a rant on whether one should include one space or two after a period ending a sentence. For Manjoo, there’s not much room for debate: “you should never, ever use two spaces after a period.” Period.

Well, not quite “period.” He takes several stabs at proving that one space is better than two, though they are mostly arguments from authority (“because typographers say so”) and taste (“because it looks prettier”), neither of which I find terribly compelling. He does make an interesting point about the difference between monospaced and proportional fonts, but it’s buried under a polemical tone utterly disproportional to the subject matter. Many of the reactions to the article are likewise full of vitriol (check out the comments on Slate, or this nice roundup), and amount to stating “you can have my two spaces when you pry them from my cold, dead hands.”

I’m not interested in arguing which is best. What intrigues me is the vehemence of both Manjoo’s diatribe and the reaction to it. I think what makes this a weirdly hot button issue is that it’s not just about preferences but also about social conventions. Why do we need any spaces at all? Or rather let me answer that question by asking it again: whydoweneedanyspacesatall? It’s a convention that developed over time in order to make written communication more efficient. The period is also a convention. And so is (are) the space(s) after it.

With the space(s) after a period, though, it’s less clear what would actually make text more readable, but that doesn’t prevent people from insisting that their way is better. It’s a bit like the conflict in Gulliver’s Travels over whether a soft-boiled egg ought to be broken on the large end or the small end. Many folks defend their own preference by saying “because that’s what I was taught,” as if that settles the matter, or that being taught one way precludes ever learning how to do it any other way.

Like most people my age, I was taught in school to type two spaces after every period. I continued this practice until well into graduate school, when I began preparing manuscripts for publication in journals that asked for one space instead (the Modern Language Association has a slight preference for one space). At first, I resisted a bit, and would keep typing two spaces as I composed, but then later I would use find-and-replace to change them all to one space. It wasn’t a matter of principle for me, though. It was the fact that my right thumb had developed the habit of pressing down twice after I typed a period. Eventually, my desire to skip an extra step in the writing process overcame my thumb’s stubbornness. So, I conformed my typing practices to whatever would make my life easier. For lots of folks, it probably doesn’t matter, and so they maintain whatever works for them.

I think we all intuit the need to conform to some sort of convention, especially with something so arbitrary-but-social as written communication. We follow these kinds of rules in order to make ourselves understood and to understand others. With the space-after-period issue, though, the convention is in flux. Most of us felt the matter was settled by the time we learned typing in high school, and many won’t change until they have a compelling reason to do so. Misguided rants won’t change anything, since they imply rule-breaking on the part of people who consider themselves linguistic law-abiding citizens.

In the aftermath of last weekend’s senseless shootings in Arizona, many folks have been quick to blame the tragedy on the violent, incendiary political rhetoric of our times. It’s not hard to find examples of such rhetoric: Giffords’s Republican rival last summer appeared in political ads holding an M-16, and apparently he even invited voters at a campaign event to shoot with him. And then there’s Sarah Palin’s poorly-conceived “target map” and Twitter post.

Whether or not the shootings can legitimately be blamed on such rhetoric, I’ll leave to others to debate. Early indications are that the shooter was a demented, unhinged individual, and perhaps didn’t need violent rhetoric to motivate his actions.

What caught my eye today, though, was John McWhorter’s piece in the New Republic blaming the prevalence of violent political rhetoric on technology:

The actual cause of this new national temper is technology and its intersection with how language is used. Language exists in two forms in modern times: speech and writing. Writing is a latterly invention only some thousands of years old, produced and received more slowly than talk. It encourages reflection, extended argument (something almost impossible to convey amidst the overlapping chaos of conversation), and objectivity. Writing is, in the McLuhanesque sense, cool.

According to this theory, the act of writing inherently carries with it a different stance toward language–methodical, deliberate, rational. It is the linguistic equivalent of the slow food movement. Writing provides a kind of firewall against our passions. What technology has done, for McWhorter, is push our use of language back into oral territory, where things are less refined:

It is no accident that the shrillness of political conversation has increased just as broadband and YouTube have become staples of American life. The internet brings us back to the linguistic culture our species arose in—all about speech: live, emotional, unreflective, and punchy. The slogan trumps the argument. Anger, often of hazy provenance but ever cathartic (“I want my country back”) takes fire. All of this is reinforced by the synergy of on line “communities” stoking up passions on a scale that snail mail never could.

As you might have guessed, I have a few problems with McWhorter’s theory here. First is the simplistic distinction between speech and writing that he posits. Not all speech is “emotional, unreflective, and punchy,” nor is all writing reflective, extended, and objective. I wouldn’t even say that these are broad tendencies. Instead, there are genres of writing that do indeed privilege the qualities he outlines–specifically the kind of essayistic writing that academics and authors at The New Republic gravitate toward. But it wouldn’t be hard to find examples of “emotional, unreflective, and punchy” rhetoric in written form. Sarah Palin’s tweet is a prime example.

I suspect, though, that McWhorter would put tweets into the category of “speech” and not “writing.” I notice that he is careful in his essay not to be too specific (other than mentioning Youtube) about exactly what technologies are causing the problem. But I think this brings us into murky waters, where the issue at hand isn’t the distinction between speech and writing, but instead between two different attitudes or stances toward rhetoric, regardless of their physical or mechanical manifestation. She may have said something similar in speeches, but at the end of the day Palin wrote that tweet. Part of her appeal (as far as I can tell) is that she can say and write crazy shit that connects with a large audience.

I would argue that technology is not the cause of increased violent rhetoric, but it does make it more visible. More to the point, technology–the web in particular–has created more opportunities for political expression for a broader range of people than ever before. In the kind of Golden Age of Writing that McWhorter seems to imagine, writing was reflective, extended, and objective because only the people with that stance toward language could get published. Web technologies have made it possible for almost anyone to publish pretty much anything they want. So, people with an “emotional, unreflective, and punchy” stance toward language suddenly have an outlet for their rhetoric as well. Technology didn’t create violent rhetoric; it was there all along.

I’m not saying that technology hasn’t contributed in some way to the increase in violent political rhetoric. It’s entirely possible that, by providing increased opportunities for such language use, technology is somehow accelerating its growth. Maybe. But I remain unconvinced by attempts to make technology itself a scapegoat for societal ills. Maybe what’s wrong with our rhetoric isn’t technology, but us.