September 2005 Archives

I usually don't give final exams because I've always been a bit skeptical of the way they purport to measure "knowledge."

At the same time, society seems to still reward those who can package their knowledge into the standardized box. Am I doing my students a favor by generating other forms of assessment or should I be providing them more opportunities to learn how to fit in?

Currently, the final exam for Public Speaking is scheduled for Friday, December 16 at 10:30 am in Macher W-26.

The final exam for Introduction to Mass Communication is scheduled for Tuesday, December 13th (the last day of class).

Imagine! Turns out the rumors of criminal activity were mostly that - rumors. So says todays New York Times. I wonder how many of those rumors they helped to perpetuate by reporting them? Of course - they reported what they heard, and probably did qualify most of these 'reports' as stories, fears, concerns....what an interesting media analysis this would be! How were those rumors categorized and couched? And then there's Bush, trying to shift attention from his lack of care to "criminals who had no mercy." I heard a language-based critique of his speech on VPR Tuesday morning, the link is posted with the speeches for written analysis for the Public Speaking class.

I had a cool job today. It was a balanced group, roughly even numbers of deaf and non-deaf participants, and a wonderful team. She fed me an incorrect number once, but also a vitally important concept that I'd missed emphasizing adequately. I backed her up on a few things too. Let her have a couple of nice long turns, too. :-) Such teamwork isn't an unusual element of interpreting - what made these examples stand out so much today is that they were the only things we had to worry about!

This was the group's third meeting. Prior to the beginning of the second meeting, one of the Deaf participants approached me, asking what I thought about how it went the first time. She had some concerns (having noticed some things), and so did I. She asked me to exaggerate the processing time when she addressed the group regarding turn-taking norms. I did - not 100% consecutive, but long enough that there was no way the non-deaf participants could ignore the fact of something being said that they couldn't understand.

Wobble Man is probably out for the count - and just when he discovered the 15 pounder! Ah well, some things are more important. :-) I'll miss his interpretations of the control panel (as he poised over the "foul" button for anyone with particularly smelly shoes).

"The spin is strong in this one" had a few lucky strikes and - via persistence - is no doubt gonna be competing with the Spin Doctor soon enough. The Doctor had three doubles last night!! Impressive.

Someone was mooning all evening, distracted. WHAT a surprise he got at the end of the day. His first game was hot then he faded throughout the rest. Dang emotions - my turn last week, his this week. Who will be next?

Supposedly there's a lot of bowling in The Big Lebowsky - which was previously recommended to me.

I'm finally reading some of Foucault's stuff - Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth. I have to admit I'm enjoying it. :-) It's also kind of embarrassing, because I can't help but recognize myself in various configurations of the technique's of the self. Foucault identifies changes in the ways people used to write about the self, tracking several phases from the Greeks, through Christianity and the Renaissance. It's sad he died in his 50s, one imagines he could have still accomplished a lot.

"Survivors look back and see omens, messages they missed."

from The Year of Magical Thinking, by Joan Didion

The still-in-process new commgrad website is looking awesome! Han has done a terrific job creating a site that promotes us to the outside world. It's clean and provides (so far) basic information that prospective and incoming students will no doubt find extremely helpful, especially international students. All good!

I was hoping there'd be a more interactive component to it for internal purposes but it's not clear that will happen. There is going to be a blog, but since folks are thinking of the overall site as an advertisement it seems doubtful that we'll take many risks there. Yes, here I am again, going on about risk-taking! I'm soooo naive! :-)

Sam was finally off antibiotics today so we had a bit of a strong red wine from Spain. David and I regaled him with stories about teaching; Sam wants to crash my class at UNH. We responded to a few messages and read a few jokes. Elektra (a new nurse) came in with his evening meds but prudently decided not to spoil his glass of wine. :-) Thanks to everyone for sending news. Sam says to you all, "Take care!" (Sam especially enjoyed the Indiana jokes from Ruth.)

Oh (how could I nearly forget?!) - who knows the codename
"Ms Mary Sunshine"? There are a few persons at Eden who aren't high on Sam's list . . .

Here's an early woman actor who wasn't mentioned by Elayne Rapping in her review of "Hollywood's Mid-1980s Feminist Heroines".

A tribute.

Thank you Ms. Stephenson. ;-)

Who knows Sandra Tsing Loh? I'm curious to hear some of her music, read something she's written . . .

Martin and Gentry use only Festinger's Social Comparison theory to describe the influence of marketing in the media, but I'd wager that Schutz' Interpersonal Needs theory also has relevance.

Speaking of moral discourse (mentioned in comments about the movie Crash):

David Hume, "A treatise on human nature: Being an Attempt to introduce the experimental Method of Reasoning into Moral Subjects

Wikipedia's entry on human nature is terrific.

is on the horizon.... after reaching the peak of Mt. Bare from Taylor Notch at a much slower pace than last fall (!) and taking in the sights, we decided to forge on to the overlook at Mt. Hitchcock - pressing into new territory and expanding all of our horizons. It was a perfect day for hiking; we spent as much time lounging in the sun as actually moving.

I also had some memories of being there being there from over a year ago, on the Summer Solstice.

Billed by B.E. as a movie that will "rip your guts out but in a good way," I have to say that Crash left me disturbed and unsettled. It certainly didn't qualify as the previously requested light, non-gutwrenching drama, but then, B.E. wasn't privy to all the nuances of the movie negotiation.

I presented on this topic to mental health care providers at the National Alliance on Mental Illness conference in Washington, DC a year ago. A one page summary of the presentation has been published online in a pdf file; scroll down to this piece directed to non-deaf professionals on pages 28-29.

I've been thinking about this science fiction book by John Barnes. It impressed me when I read it with a sharp clarity about a possible future. The storm he describes wipes out most of Mexico and the Southwest U.S. - bigger than what we've seen so far but the double-whammy of Katrina and Rita begins to approximate the environmental disaster that forms the central event of Barnes' grim depiction.

"This issue [of KM4D, on "Approaches to promote knowledge sharing in international development organizations" presents papers on experiences with knowledge sharing in international development organisations, highlighting strategies and approaches used to foster knowledge sharing in diverse settings and presenting their results."http://www.km4dev.org/journal/index.php/km4dj

This is cool. Deborah Elizabeth Finn, who blogs for & about non-profits just went off and started a new wikipedia page! One of these days I might be so bold. In the meantime, maybe there's a way to play/practice with this...I haven't paid attention (yet) to wikipedia's formatting guidelines (what 'counts' and what doesn't)...but my practice with SocialText at least has given me some confidence to experiment.

but I'm still optimistic the students in intro to mass comm are gonna be jazzed as we continue. It's hard work devising a strategy for learning when "the lesson" isn't laid out on a platter; but we're gonna pull it off. Flashes of brilliance abound, from all quarters. :-)

For COM 260, Section 4:

Teresa will critique Wade Boggs Baseball Hall of Fame Induction Speech

MIckaela and Sean will both critique Jim Valvano's Induction Speech.

Here's a critique of Bush's speech after Hurricane Katrina that I heard on Vermont Public Radio by Philip Baruth.

The "Checkers" speech by soon-to-be-impeached Richard Nixon might be interesting.

I'm teaching a friend how to drive. He keeps teasing me about the friend I tried to teach last year (who stopped taking lessons after I attempted to teach her to look at the blind spots through physical manipulation). Another friends shares her inspiring "learning to drive" story:

"I hit a house on my last driving school lesson. I don't know if I ever mentioned that. Drove across the yellow line, jumped the curb, shot across the sidewalk, swerved around an oak tree, smashed through some hedges, drove over a kiddie pool (thank God no kids were in it) and crashed into the corner of a house before coming to a complete stop. That was pretty exciting, especially when the cops and the fire department and the tow truck and the president of the driving school showed up."

My buddy only tried to take out a gas station yesterday. No biggie.

well, he's not totally against it, but he's definitely for curtailing it. His hard-hitting critique says much (blurring the terms translation and intepretation), including a call

"to go beyond the logic inscribed in the discourse of translation. If one is to believe in translation, in the people who support and live from translations, translation is always necessary and that's the end of the story. But if one begins by looking at interlingual space, the only real question is how we ever came to believe in translation so much. How did we ever get to this ideal "usage de toutes les langues" and the associated theories?

Several reasons:

First, there is a wide gap between the official discourse and what actually happens on the ground. Despite claims to respect multilingualism through translation, the European Commission deploys what is called a "real needs policy", which basically incorporates use of a lingua franca or the use of passive competences wherever possible, as happened in the French-English conference cited above. This tends to mean that the more specialized the meetings, the less there are interpreters present. The official discourse on translation is thus largely produced for external consumption, to keep the masses and academics happy.

Second, because the official discourse exists, many translations are carried out for purely symbolic purposes."

from a google search on language regime European parliament:

a thesis on the EU language regime (addresses both translation and interpretation) Quotes follow from this thesis:

"The Interpreting Directorate of the European Parliament employs approximately 240 permanent staff interpreters and relies on a reserve of more than 1000 auxiliary conference interpreters, of whom between 200 and 500 must be recruited each day to cover its needs. In 2002, the total volume of activity represented 56000 interpreter days for the European Parliament organs alone. Staff interpreters accounted for ± 50% of these working days, the remainder being provided by auxiliary conference interpreters. (Europa: Gateway to the European Union)"

"According to the official website of the European Commission, in 2004, the twenty official languages of the European Union are: Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Estonian, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hungarian, Italian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Maltese, Polish, Portuguese, Slovak, Slovene, Spanish and Swedish (Europa: Gateway to the European Union). The website provides elaborate information and detailed figures on the official languages in 199815, indicating the weight and importance of each language according to various data and inquiries."

Somewhere, this person got the idea that Esperanto is being used by many people within the EU institutions. Maybe I was in the wrong places or talking to the wrong people to find this out? People whom I met that were completely unassociated with the EU and interpreting would sometimes ask me about Esperanto when they found out what I was doing, but the word never arose in any of the fieldwork.

Sam feels badly that so many of you write to him and he often doesn't have the energy to respond. It sure does make his day though - big grins for sure. :-) Wes recently sent an update on a whole bunch of old pals - brought back a lot of memories. These make Sam happy. He asked me today if I could believe he's been here in Eden Park for four years. Says it feels like the time has gone by fast. I figure that's good, even though I do recall some times when I visited and the time felt interminable to him.

Sam especially enjoys saucy jokes and news about friends and family. He's been on anti-biotics off and on for ages, so we haven't been able to indulge together, but did take some time to fill in Raz on the parties that used to occur at the house in Putney (not to mention those that occasionally happen here!)

This is a letter from a tourist who didn't make it out of New Orleans. He wrote this to his mother; it was then sent on to friends and Ira posted it to the social justice listserv at UMass. Thanks.

Another letter was written by emergency medical personnel who were in New Orleans for a conference.

Also, a link to teaching resources.

Because part of my funding for the EuroParl interpreter research came from anthropology, there's been a big push to do ethnography. I've really only collected discourse at this stage, which I will look at through a critical discourse lens because I'm interested in language hierarchies and linguistic inequality. There is plenty of evidence of these things in EuroParl interpreters' talk about their work and working conditions. Rather than deduction (coming up with an hypothesis based on theory) or induction (making what I find fit some theory), abduction is about invention. It requires applying imagination to generate theory, to come up with categories based on the combination of characteristics discovered (the expected and the unexpected). My next task is to distinguish between what Agar calls rich points (the surprises) and those things that meshed with my expectations.

As I've been reading the new chapter, Ethnography Reconstructed, that Michael Agar added to the new edition of his text, The Professional Stranger, I was reminded of the discussions I had with some EuroParl interpreters regarding journalism and research. The question, as I'm revisiting it now, was clearly about concerns regarding what I would actually do with the data. Several interpreters were concerned with misrepresentation, having what they said taken out of context. A few had had bad experiences with the press and were even more wary. Some just wanted to be clear that I was not a journalist because interpreters are professionally proscribed from speaking to journalists about their work.

The question of what I am 'going to do' with all those hours of audiotaped interviews and notes is serious. I don't know if the question of journalism/research was a mirror or parallel for the question of critical or applied, but it is obvious to me now that I've been a bit confused about the differences between these two modes and need to gain clarity and make some decisions pretty darn fast.

for critique and archives. These are listed in Jarice's co-edited text (with Alison Alexander), Taking Sides: Clashing Views on Controversial Issues in Mass Media and Society, 8th Edition, 2005.

The Center for Media Education has changed to the Media Education Foundation (I think).

General Communication Resources from the University of Iowa

The Kaiser Family Foundation

Writer's Guild of America

Cultural and Media Studies at the University of Natal-Durban in South Africa

The Freedom Forum

Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting

Vanderbilt University's Television News Archives

Advertising Age

I suppose there's lots of video material online now, but here's a source from Alternet, which is a reputable online news source. Same video, different source. And then there's the print media:

Because i can never find this kind of info when I need it: Managing class email lists.

The students in public speaking pulled a fast one on my yesterday. I wondered what they were up to when more than half of them were huddled together on the steps of Machmer right before class. Elaine apparently wondered whether I even noticed the masking tape nametags they were all wearing in order to ace the test on each other's names. It was hard to miss Luke with his nametag on his headfore!

I was quite pleased to see it, as I had been worrying class hadn't been "fun enough" - dealing with the logistics of setting up a collaborative curriculum (not to mention the swampy heat of our mid-afternoon class session). It was a good move to try and get back at me for bluffing them on that 20-30 page paper... :-)

Q: What is Bush's position on Roe vs. Wade?

A: He really doesn't care HOW people got out of New Orleans.

Nice editorial in the NYTimes today, but the political struggle isn't over.

Jeremy posts this top ten list to the AoIR listserv, focused on operational and engineering problems.

Wish I could go (wish I could go to so many things!) -

This international conference geared to youth engages "the phenomenon of digital inequality points to limitations consolidated by effects of cultural, social and material resources: Economical resources affect opportunities of access, priorities of everyday life shape respective intentions of internet use, social relationships have an impact on the support structures available and ways of appropriation reproduce a specific understanding of informal education (“Bildung”)."

They don't specify age ranges in the call but are specific to educational and social policies. It could be K-12 but I've got undergraduates on my mind...

Info on the International Convention to Promote and Protect the Rights of Persons with Disabilities.

Even though she doesn't want it, Laurene is leading in at least one poll for next Gallaudet President.

Nancy Bloch ++++++++ 2.3%
Dr. Robert Davila ++++++++ 14.4%
Dr. Carol Padden ++++++++ 10.2%
Dr. Roslyn (Roz) Rosen ++++++++ 12.8%
Dr. Laurene (Gallimore) Simms ++++++++ 39.7%
Dr. Benjamin J. Soukup, Jr. ++++++++ 20.6%

Lately I've been just scanning the NYTimes headlines. The big picture is so grim. :-( And then there are these individuals working so hard on specific, tangible, real and practical issues, such as the Connecticut River "Source to Sea" Clean-Up effort being coordinated along its entire length. Shemaya's taken up the Holyoke area's "Source to Sea" event on Saturday, Oct 1. To learn about the annual event, check out this Virtual Field Trip.

Events are also scheduled in Northfield, MA, Littleton and Columbia, NH, Westfield, MA, Springfield, MA, and no doubt many other communities along the Connecticut's four-state path.

Full details for the Holyoke event in Spanish and English follow...

history of the term, originally referred to the "truth-evaluable" and was intended "to re-introduce belief and desire into psychology".

Time ran out before I could chatter on about the last couple chapters of MacIntyre's book last night, but I thought I'd put my random thoughts 'out there' anyway. :-)

I wasn't going to talk about the different moral philosophers at all, because according to MacIntryre after Hegel everyone is just rehashing old positions in supposedly new formulations. I was thinking of the language, social structure, individual categories that Robin said are essential to any definition of morality.

Herein lies the distinction between deliberative, ceremonial, and forensic speeches, succinctly labeled by Stephen as being about the future, the present, and the past, respectively.

Yesterday the Massachusetts Constitutional Convention voted to sustain the year-old same-sex marriage law by voting against a proposed constitutional amendment banning gay marriage. Hoorah!

My cumulative question in reading MacIntyre's last four chapters has to do with the relationship(s) among Nietzsche's emphasis on health and sickness (224) and MacIntrye's use of "fatal" (201) and "grave" (202) while discussing Hegel. It's unclear to me if he is paraphrasing using Hegel's terms or his own. It seems there is a judgment operating that if persons don't find/discover/invent/create/whatever (!) an ethics then they "die" - but since we all die anyway I'm not sure of the conceptual function of these dire terms.

Tom Atlee forwards this article by Bill McKibben, who states: "a month before Katrina hit, MIT hurricane specialist Kerry Emmanuel published a landmark paper in the British science magazine Nature showing that tropical storms are now lasting half again as long and spinning winds 50 percent more powerful than just a few decades before." (The article is downloadable as a pdf; click through on the link above and scroll down.)

McKibben concludes, "New Orleans doesn't look like the America we've lived in. But it very much resembles the planet we will inhabit the rest of our lives."

Here's a chart Tom Atlee has put together that "shows a big reason to prioritize developing our macro-scale (societal and global) collective intelligence and wisdom." This is necessary, he argues (and I agree), because our individual intelligences are insufficient to solve the problems our social structure instigates.

According to Stephen, referring back to Aristotle, there are three types of speeches, and these revolve around "...a question of the speaker's relationship to judgments about the past (forensic), present (epideictic), and future (deliberative)." This site,"On Rhetoric" distinguishes clearly among these three types.

Context: the study of moral discourse

Kierkegaard is big on choice and rationality. (They are all big on rationality. This is where I take issue. As if there is only one kind.) At some point, Kierkegaard says argument must end and we must choose to believe - we must decide. To decide - this is sparking a memory of latin roots from a comparison of different kinds of talk (debate, discussion, etc.). "cide" has something to do with murder, right? So to make a choice, to decide is to kill off other possibilities. "de" probably means something too . . .

These are links to most of the entries I made about the fieldwork. NOT included are posts specific to methodology and analytical theory.

I commandeered this thread for the course on Moral Discourse - I know we're supposed to examine others moral discourse, but you know I find ourselves implicated in everything we study? Yeah.

I've understood Marx as pinpointing work as the fulcrum of the social structure, but I never took him for a class-based relativist. Instead of arguing his own points and critique of the bourgeois, he chose - rhetorically? - to utilize their own internal arguments. I also didn't know he neglected any serious examination of the morality of the working classes.

I do know he didn't account for the actual mechanisms of transformation from capitalism to socialism. According to MacIntyre, Marx's conception of freedom is Hegel's: "not something which [men] have, as men, but which they are" (211).

I'm not sure about MacIntyre's assessment that there are no philosophical innovations after Hegel because changes in social structures could (I imagine) invoke new kinds of relations and thus different orders of morality. This notion is in keeping (?) with Hegel's emphasis on the dialectic between the specifics of a social situation as a frame that conditions/limits the morality that can emerge.

There's something about freedom and the negative which lock up in the individual who wants to experiment with virtue. Hegel poo-poos the notion mightily, scoffing at the arrogance of anyone who thinks they can buck the norms of a social group. This is because "what gives a sanction to our moral choices is in part the fact that the criteria which govern our choices are not chosen" (208).

A ton of resources:

http://www.classism.org/

My colleagues rise to the occasion (as always) and suggest:

- the COM dept's own video library
- list of campus offerings (can be seen live; some of which may also be videotaped)
- CSPAN and/or CNN
- several videos are available from the publisher" of the assigned text (scroll down)
- not to mention (!) the CDRom which comes with the text - it includes several speeches (noted in the text

i tried to go here before and failed, but now it's working. Another place to play - someday.

http://wiki.aoir.org/index.php?title=Main_Page

Paul's predictive powers are amazing. Free, ad-free Skype was good while it lasted. Their "forward-looking statement" neglects to mention compromises in favor of (assumed) continuing product proliferation.

And then there's SocialText ("wiki meets blogging" - let's hope he's not too prescient with that too? I haven't got to play enough! :-/ I'm sure he's not intending to sell Dexus for a buck. A euro, maybe.

A new book by Jan-Kåre Breivik looks awesome: Deaf Identities in the Making. Local Lives, Transnational Connections.

A must read!

what I didn't get to do this summer. sigh, there's always next year, right?

I'm teaching two classes at two different universities - public speaking at one and intro to mass comm at the other. PS meets 2x/week, masscom once/week plus an online discussion board (which is quite full, awaiting reading today, yeah!). On the surface there is no parallel: different topic, different structure. But both classes are concerned with effect - with the production of a desired response (and, arguably, with the fallout of unintended or unforeseen effects as well).

There are many different kinds of effects:

The woman writing this storm blog explains: "The way I post, is also the way I show up in the world - I just go where my energy moves me."

Yeah.

at least this doesn't happen only in america! :-)

The airport code for Cape Town International Airport is CPT. This is the closest and is where transport is arranged from.

The code for Johannesburg International is JNB. Might be cheaper. Transport?

He guessed last week that Apple was about ready to unveil something new - here it is, the nano.

And then there's the Harry Potter iPod. Hmmmm....

Kanye West's Torrent of Criticism, Live on NBC
By Lisa de Moraes
Saturday, September 3, 2005; Page C01
Washington Post

forwarded by Carlos, Social Justice listserv

Why We Love Live Television, Reason No. 137:

NBC's levee broke and Kanye West flooded through with a tear about the federal response in New Orleans during the network's live concert fundraiser for victims of Hurricane Katrina last night. Kanye West performs on ABC's "Good Morning America" concert series at New York's Lincoln Center on Friday, Sept. 2, 2005. West's second CD, "Late Registration," was released Aug. 30.

Yep. Left Carolyn’s (with a pang, I confess) :-( and hustled all my stuff to Florence. This room is going to work out well, been getting it together this morning and I like how it feels. :-) Meanwhile, school officially begins for me tomorrow: “off to the races” as if I haven’t already been!

My overall orientation to time is different, though, as well as my awareness(es)…. it’s kinda cool to witness my own development leap. :-) Will it last? We shall see. I've been dreaming like crazy - all kinds of relationship stuff, theory, even about the convergence of themes in the blog (!) - looking for a link, I found this on babies' consciousness: it's pretty darn cool.

***On Fri 5:40a Sep 2, 2005 maillist@michaelmoore.com wrote***
Friday, September 2nd, 2005

Dear Mr. Bush:

Any idea where all our helicopters are? It's Day 5 of Hurricane Katrina and thousands remain stranded in New Orleans and need to be airlifted. Where on earth could you have misplaced all our military choppers? Do you need help finding them? I once lost my car in a Sears parking lot. Man, was that a drag.

Also, any idea where all our national guard soldiers are? We could really use them right now for the type of thing they signed up to do like helping with national disasters. How come they weren't there to begin with?

Last Thursday I was in south Florida and sat outside while the eye of
Hurricane Katrina passed over my head. It was only a Category 1 then but it was pretty nasty. Eleven people died and, as of today, there were still homes without power. That night the weatherman said this storm was on its way to New Orleans. That was Thursday! Did anybody tell you? I know you didn't want to interrupt your vacation and I know how you don't like to get bad news. Plus, you had fundraisers to go to and mothers of dead soldiers to ignore and smear. You sure showed her!

Here's a great piece on the unspoken racism and classism being covertly fed by the mainstream news coverage of Katrina.

When I started this book by Vikram Seth on Srinivas' recommendation last spring I thought he was torturing me with an unrequited love story. I've picked it up again - trying to squeeze in (out?) the teensiest bit of pleasure reading in the midst of one of my most intensive work periods ever. Turns out there's a whole late-deafened thing going on....the process is described well I think:

"It was a strange transition from the world of sound to the world of deafness - not soundlessness, really, because I do hear all sorts of noises, only usually they're the wrong ones" (193). And this commentary on lipreading: " . . . you will never be able to learn from the lips alone if someone has lost her glove or her love" (194).

I've actually been mulling the syllabi and approach to teaching my two new courses for weeks, but now it's time for the rubber to meet the road.

UNH has given me an open slate to teach as experimentally as I wish, which is a rare and beautiful gift. I'm psyched as I consider the possibilities. Hopefully the students will live up to their rep and embrace a more organic, less definitive model.