Archive for March, 2009

March 16th 2009

Musicians

Musicians

I have some particular interest in music as it relates to thought processes. I find myself as much in awe of the way musicians move from one harmony to the next as I am of musical dissonance. In the music of ancient China, musicians played different instruments, but the same note on each in a Confucian sense of order and place and responsibility. Present-day discordance may not necessarily challenge this order–consider how the varied repeated strains of a Philip Glass composition combine and interweave in a similar movement, yet with starkly different outcomes.

So, this link to a Scientific American article on how musician’s brains keep time with each other has me rapt. How does that happen?

In any case, there’s one modern band that captures what the Sci-Am blog is talking about:

If the video isn’t enough, the song is listed below.

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March 15th 2009

Final Edition

Final Edition

I was sad to watch this video, as I have always been a great fan of newsprint.


Final Edition from Matthew Roberts on Vimeo.

After 149 years and 311 days, the Rocky Mountain News published its final edition on February 27, 2009.

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March 13th 2009

Ethnographies of Men and Women

Ethnographies of Men and Women

I linked to the video below in another post, but I just came from a workshop on the different ways men and women interact in classes.  The Tannen stuff is not new, but the implications for students’ ethnographic research are interesting.  After all, what I think of as old hat is remade new with each generation.

Thankfully!

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March 12th 2009

Radio Habana

Radio Habana

If you are in SF on a Thursday/Friday night, you have to have a beer or Sangria at Radio Habana just for the experience.

A party of us had dinner at Greens, at Fort Mason, then limo’d to the Mission for a taste of SF.  The pic doesn’t really describe it.  Read more on Yelp: Radio Habana Social Club.

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March 11th 2009

4Cs-SF Cross Cultural Rhetoric

4Cs-SF Cross Cultural Rhetoric

I attended one of the best workshops I’ve been to at any convention today.  The web site on CCR (in the picture) has a lot of the detail from the workshop.The workshop began with a focus on the macro and each stage of the workshop worked from that perspective to the micro.

Susan Thomas, from Australia, spoke of her work building a writing program with an emphasis on connecting globally.  “It is one thing,” she said, “to have students from Sydney talking to one another,” but getting them to talk to students across the world broadens their horizons in extraordinary ways.

Helle Rytkonen, a Stanford professor, spoke of her collaboration with a class in Sweden using Marratech (video conferencing) software.  Her focus is much like mine in the classroom–an emphasis on exposing the invisible, the cultural things taken for granted by our students.  She said, “normalcy has many faces” as she described the way her students, and those in Scandinavia, connected to learn about what they share and what is different between them.  She showed a YouTube video called How To Shower: Men vs Women, which is shown to both classes and they all connect on the male vs female norms.  But then, as the course progresses, students begin to recognize differences in the political and social expectations of their cultures.  US students learn to see themselves as foreigners see them–and students in other lands see that students in the US may not fit what they expected.  It was a fascinating way to bring the globalization issue into the classroom.

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March 10th 2009

4Cs-SF, PreWorkshop Wiki

4Cs-SF, PreWorkshop Wiki

4Cs begins, for me, tomorrow afternoon at what seems to me to be an exciting workshop on Cross-Cultural Connections.  And it starts with a wiki, a tool I’m learning to use in my online classrooms to get students to interact and create meaning.  The workshop promises to be overfilled with information, judging from the wiki contents, but I’m just so impressed at the possibilities for collaboration the internet allows.  Amazing.  I’ll report tomorrow.

One of the newest waves in composition and rhetoric studies is the interdisciplinary area of Cross-Cultural Rhetoric.  At the intersection of digital writing pedagogy, intercultural communication, and contemporary rhetoric, the aim of cross-cultural rhetoric might best be described as helping to transform students into global citizens, equipped with the communication and collaboration strategies they will need for active, ethical participation in a world community.  Yet how can we prepare our students, classrooms, colleagues, and governing institutions to meet the necessary challenge of global learning as the next wave in higher education?

New pedagogical approaches, curricular materials, technology tools, and WPA initiatives are needed to adequately address the current rhetorical situation that faces first-year composition and writing centers.

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