Sunday, December 13, 2009
My first Web text!
I am officially a Web text author! Check out my Web text Click Here to Learn: Teaching Writing Conventions in Online Tutorials.
Tuesday, November 17, 2009
Italian-hyphen-American
A colleague of mine gave a presentation today in which he discussed the nature of the hyphen in the label given to his ethnicity, Greek-American. I've never thought of myself as Italian-American, but at different times in my life, I have been.
I was born and raised in Ohio, so I've always thought of myself as simply American. My father, though, was born in Italy. My Uncle Nick, also Italian-born, taught me the lyrics to La Donna Mobile when I was far too young to think that calling a woman fickle was a problem. We did some things in my family -- ate biscotti, played Scopa, sang opera songs...loud -- that just seemed like normal family things to me. I never really thought of them as Italian.
If you were to see a picture of me as a little girl, you would think I looked Italian: brown eyes, dark brown hair. In "Articulating authentic Chineseness: The politics of reading race and ethnicity aesthetically," Sue Hum explains that such an aesthetic reading of someone's race is highly problematic: When we label someone as a certain race or ethnicity based on the way he or she looks, we perpetuate stereotypes of race and ethnicity and ignore whether a person chooses to enact the roles of a certain culture. While I agree that such aesthetic readings of ethnicity are problematic, they can also contribute in a positive way to a person's self-image. As a little girl, looking Italian was a good thing.
My looks weren't the only part of my childhood that could have linked me to another culture, though. As a little girl, I used to pronounce the word both as "bolth." Not until I was a teenager and someone pointed it out to me did I hear the "l" sound in my pronunciation. I hadn't realized anything was strange about the way I said the word -- my father said it that way, as did my younger sister. Once I realized my pronounciation was wrong -- or, shall we say, not traditional -- I practiced saying "both, both, both" until I trained the "l" out of my speech. Years later, it occurred to me that I had likely learned to pronounce the word from my father who, because Italian does not have a "th" sound, does not enunciate words with "th" sounds in the same way that I do. (I still haven't figured out why my dad and my sister say "sangwich" for "sandwich." If anyone has a theory, I'd love to hear it.)
But back to being aesthetically Italian...as I grew older, I began to dye blond streaks in my hair and stopped singing opera with my father. My uncle was around less, so we played less Scopa. I wasn't consciously moving away from being Italian, but I was noticeably becoming more "American."
The most drastic shift away from my Italian heritage came when I traded my Italian last name for an American one. The American last name was easier to pronounce, and I have to admit that in the time I had it, it was wonderful to not have to repeat my name, or to spell it out, or to explain that my name is "Ann...Amicucci," not "Ann...Micucci." But I missed being Italian.
I'm now happy to have the name Amicucci as a label of my Italian heritage. As an Amicucci, I have an immediate connection with any other (aesthetically labeled) Italian that I meet. With an American last name, I felt like a no-culture individual. I blended in, but not in a good way. Claiming an aesthetic identity gives me a connection to a culture that -- even if I'm actually American, not actually (authentically?) Italian -- I'm proud to be connected with.
I was born and raised in Ohio, so I've always thought of myself as simply American. My father, though, was born in Italy. My Uncle Nick, also Italian-born, taught me the lyrics to La Donna Mobile when I was far too young to think that calling a woman fickle was a problem. We did some things in my family -- ate biscotti, played Scopa, sang opera songs...loud -- that just seemed like normal family things to me. I never really thought of them as Italian.
If you were to see a picture of me as a little girl, you would think I looked Italian: brown eyes, dark brown hair. In "Articulating authentic Chineseness: The politics of reading race and ethnicity aesthetically," Sue Hum explains that such an aesthetic reading of someone's race is highly problematic: When we label someone as a certain race or ethnicity based on the way he or she looks, we perpetuate stereotypes of race and ethnicity and ignore whether a person chooses to enact the roles of a certain culture. While I agree that such aesthetic readings of ethnicity are problematic, they can also contribute in a positive way to a person's self-image. As a little girl, looking Italian was a good thing.
My looks weren't the only part of my childhood that could have linked me to another culture, though. As a little girl, I used to pronounce the word both as "bolth." Not until I was a teenager and someone pointed it out to me did I hear the "l" sound in my pronunciation. I hadn't realized anything was strange about the way I said the word -- my father said it that way, as did my younger sister. Once I realized my pronounciation was wrong -- or, shall we say, not traditional -- I practiced saying "both, both, both" until I trained the "l" out of my speech. Years later, it occurred to me that I had likely learned to pronounce the word from my father who, because Italian does not have a "th" sound, does not enunciate words with "th" sounds in the same way that I do. (I still haven't figured out why my dad and my sister say "sangwich" for "sandwich." If anyone has a theory, I'd love to hear it.)
But back to being aesthetically Italian...as I grew older, I began to dye blond streaks in my hair and stopped singing opera with my father. My uncle was around less, so we played less Scopa. I wasn't consciously moving away from being Italian, but I was noticeably becoming more "American."
The most drastic shift away from my Italian heritage came when I traded my Italian last name for an American one. The American last name was easier to pronounce, and I have to admit that in the time I had it, it was wonderful to not have to repeat my name, or to spell it out, or to explain that my name is "Ann...Amicucci," not "Ann...Micucci." But I missed being Italian.
I'm now happy to have the name Amicucci as a label of my Italian heritage. As an Amicucci, I have an immediate connection with any other (aesthetically labeled) Italian that I meet. With an American last name, I felt like a no-culture individual. I blended in, but not in a good way. Claiming an aesthetic identity gives me a connection to a culture that -- even if I'm actually American, not actually (authentically?) Italian -- I'm proud to be connected with.
Thursday, November 12, 2009
Author of your own life
A recent column of Andrew Sullivan's got me thinking about the changing values of authorship. Do I want to be an author? And what do I mean by author?
When I was little, I loved to write. I still do. I started college not knowing what to major in: I considered architecture until I flipped through a few textbooks and then, intimidated, changed my mind. When I finally chose a major, it was magazine journalism. The dream, of course, was to become a columnist, sit by the window of my New York City apartment, and write a monthly column for Vogue. Simple, right? Then I took Print Beat Reporting. I realized that all journalism isn't exciting, but as a journalist, it's your job to make even the blah stories newsworthy. It was time to become an English major.
When I was 20 or so and someone asked if I planned to use my degree to teach, I scoffed at the idea. I had never considered being a teacher. A few years later, though, I realized that I was really in to the idea of getting paid to talk with other people about writing.
I still dream about writing that column for Vogue or publishing a novel someday, but I'm less enthusiastic about doing either. Sure, I love to write, but ultimately, publishing has to do with more than just writing -- the focus is on sharing writing with an audience. I'm just as comfortable talking about writing in a classroom and practicing it on my own time.
If, as Sullivan says, we're all authors, then becoming an author doesn't mean the same thing that it used to. But aren't we all authors already, in other ways? Every time I talk with a student about her writing, I'm authoring another dialogic learning experience. In turn, she is an author even if I am the only one to see what she writes.
When I was little, I loved to write. I still do. I started college not knowing what to major in: I considered architecture until I flipped through a few textbooks and then, intimidated, changed my mind. When I finally chose a major, it was magazine journalism. The dream, of course, was to become a columnist, sit by the window of my New York City apartment, and write a monthly column for Vogue. Simple, right? Then I took Print Beat Reporting. I realized that all journalism isn't exciting, but as a journalist, it's your job to make even the blah stories newsworthy. It was time to become an English major.
When I was 20 or so and someone asked if I planned to use my degree to teach, I scoffed at the idea. I had never considered being a teacher. A few years later, though, I realized that I was really in to the idea of getting paid to talk with other people about writing.
I still dream about writing that column for Vogue or publishing a novel someday, but I'm less enthusiastic about doing either. Sure, I love to write, but ultimately, publishing has to do with more than just writing -- the focus is on sharing writing with an audience. I'm just as comfortable talking about writing in a classroom and practicing it on my own time.
If, as Sullivan says, we're all authors, then becoming an author doesn't mean the same thing that it used to. But aren't we all authors already, in other ways? Every time I talk with a student about her writing, I'm authoring another dialogic learning experience. In turn, she is an author even if I am the only one to see what she writes.
Saturday, October 24, 2009
Intro to Tech Paper
I'm starting to work on my paper for Literacy and Technology class, and I'm focusing on online tutorials. I'm considering presenting this research as a video in the style of the tutorials themselves. Here's a taste...
Tuesday, October 20, 2009
How many ships can a portmanteau?
I spoke to my father on the phone last night. We enjoy quizzing each other on new words, and these word discussions are usually prompted by the same conversational exchange:
Dad: So, how are you?
Ann: Good.
Dad: Come on, you have to start using some better adjectives. You always say "good"!
Last night, the first word on offer was "blaccent." After listening to "Sounding Black" on Studio 360 this Sunday, I latched on to this word: black + accent = blaccent. It's a portmanteau, a word that, like manny or grool (Mean Girls fans will remember that one), is formed by combining two existing words.
The next word up for discussion, of course, was portmanteau.
And finally, we talked about "bacronym," a portmanteau that is itself a language term. A bacronym is a retrofitted acronym: I discovered the word in relation to the term wiki, which originates from the Hawaiian word for "fast," but which has been bacronymed to mean "what I know is." If you're a fan of The Office, you've encountered a backronym before: when Michael talks about the swag he receives at conventions, he backronyms the word to mean "stuff we all get."
Monday, October 5, 2009
Tech Troubles
Can we ever turn off technology?
This summer, I attended the Kenyon Review Summer Writers Workshop (https://www.kenyonreview.org/workshops-wwinfo.php) and told myself I would turn my cell phone off for the week I spent in Gambier, Ohio. I lasted one day.
I arrived in Gambier -- a town so small that the center of campus and the center of town are the same place -- on a Saturday afternoon and picked up my issued staples -- one KR t-shirt, one thin towel, one small pillow -- then headed to my dorm room. By the end of the night, I had gotten back in my car and driven to the nearest Wal-Mart to buy some full-size bath towels and a cell phone charger. I didn't talk to many people on the phone that week, but the feeling of not having a cell phone turned on and with me at all times was just too strange to get used to.
I see an even greater connectedness to technology among the college undergraduates I teach. Texting, for example, is such an omnipresent form of communication in college student life that it seems normal to people in the 18- to 24-year-old generation to be texting while doing other things -- while in class, for example. I've had to come to terms with this as a teacher, to realize that when a student is texting in class, she isn't disrespectful, she is just engaging in a practice that, to her, is just as normal as doodling in the corner of a notebook was for me when I was her age.
As a teacher, I think that educating tech-connected students means meeting them halfway: Bringing technologies that students are familiar with into the classroom can make class more user-friendly for students and can also encourage students to think critically about the technologies they use. What I haven't yet discovered is how to bring technologies into a class without overwhelming students with work. I've taught a class, for example, in which students wrote private blogs on Blackboard and also posted in online class discussion forums. Both of these activities were done in addition to -- rather than instead of -- other class work such as in-class conversation and traditional paper-writing. I don't want to overload students with tasks, but I want to bring multiple modes of learning (or, in the case of my classes, of writing) into a course.
This question of how to integrate multiple technologies into a class without overloading students with work could lead to an interesting line of inquiry for research. If I were going to conduct research in this area, I would certainly want to hear from students. In a former class of mine in which students wrote a reflective blog, for example, I found that students who most needed to reflect critically on their work in the course -- such as those students who were struggling -- were the least likely to be consistent in writing on their blog. There were other students in the group who had no problem fulfilling the requirement of writing on the blog regularly, but their reflection often seemed to be more "what the teacher wants to hear" than indicative of any substantial reflective thought. Only a third or so of the class seemed to benefit from this added technology in the way I hoped they would, which I found discouraging (although a similar rate of success could happen with any new technology or assignment introduced into a class). These students' voices would be important to include in a study of reflective blogging, because only by asking them about their experience could I truly understand what such an added technology offered to the students.
But back to the Summer Writers Workshop... Although I didn't manage to turn off my cell phone, I certainly did talk on it less than I would have in a comparable week at home. I also lived for that week in a dorm room with no television, and the silence -- and the thought it bred -- was wonderful. When I returned home to Pittsburgh, I gave my t.v. away, and I've managed to not t purchase a new one in the three months since. I've discovered more time in my days that I used to waste in front of the television, but I've also filled some of that time with YouTube videos and e-mail. If I ever did decide to try to turn technology off in the way that Eric Brende did (http://www.stlouisrickshaw.com/about.html), I would need to make a considerably greater effort. I'm thinking a small cottage off Walden Pond, and lots of notebooks...
This summer, I attended the Kenyon Review Summer Writers Workshop (https://www.kenyonreview.org/workshops-wwinfo.php) and told myself I would turn my cell phone off for the week I spent in Gambier, Ohio. I lasted one day.
I arrived in Gambier -- a town so small that the center of campus and the center of town are the same place -- on a Saturday afternoon and picked up my issued staples -- one KR t-shirt, one thin towel, one small pillow -- then headed to my dorm room. By the end of the night, I had gotten back in my car and driven to the nearest Wal-Mart to buy some full-size bath towels and a cell phone charger. I didn't talk to many people on the phone that week, but the feeling of not having a cell phone turned on and with me at all times was just too strange to get used to.
I see an even greater connectedness to technology among the college undergraduates I teach. Texting, for example, is such an omnipresent form of communication in college student life that it seems normal to people in the 18- to 24-year-old generation to be texting while doing other things -- while in class, for example. I've had to come to terms with this as a teacher, to realize that when a student is texting in class, she isn't disrespectful, she is just engaging in a practice that, to her, is just as normal as doodling in the corner of a notebook was for me when I was her age.
As a teacher, I think that educating tech-connected students means meeting them halfway: Bringing technologies that students are familiar with into the classroom can make class more user-friendly for students and can also encourage students to think critically about the technologies they use. What I haven't yet discovered is how to bring technologies into a class without overwhelming students with work. I've taught a class, for example, in which students wrote private blogs on Blackboard and also posted in online class discussion forums. Both of these activities were done in addition to -- rather than instead of -- other class work such as in-class conversation and traditional paper-writing. I don't want to overload students with tasks, but I want to bring multiple modes of learning (or, in the case of my classes, of writing) into a course.
This question of how to integrate multiple technologies into a class without overloading students with work could lead to an interesting line of inquiry for research. If I were going to conduct research in this area, I would certainly want to hear from students. In a former class of mine in which students wrote a reflective blog, for example, I found that students who most needed to reflect critically on their work in the course -- such as those students who were struggling -- were the least likely to be consistent in writing on their blog. There were other students in the group who had no problem fulfilling the requirement of writing on the blog regularly, but their reflection often seemed to be more "what the teacher wants to hear" than indicative of any substantial reflective thought. Only a third or so of the class seemed to benefit from this added technology in the way I hoped they would, which I found discouraging (although a similar rate of success could happen with any new technology or assignment introduced into a class). These students' voices would be important to include in a study of reflective blogging, because only by asking them about their experience could I truly understand what such an added technology offered to the students.
But back to the Summer Writers Workshop... Although I didn't manage to turn off my cell phone, I certainly did talk on it less than I would have in a comparable week at home. I also lived for that week in a dorm room with no television, and the silence -- and the thought it bred -- was wonderful. When I returned home to Pittsburgh, I gave my t.v. away, and I've managed to not t purchase a new one in the three months since. I've discovered more time in my days that I used to waste in front of the television, but I've also filled some of that time with YouTube videos and e-mail. If I ever did decide to try to turn technology off in the way that Eric Brende did (http://www.stlouisrickshaw.com/about.html), I would need to make a considerably greater effort. I'm thinking a small cottage off Walden Pond, and lots of notebooks...
Thursday, October 1, 2009
Bacon is the new cupcakes
I’ve been reading some 1995 Clifford Stoll ranting against technology and have to laugh at his—and my own, at times—grumpy resistance to all that is new and cool. Stoll is grumpy in general about technology: kids don’t need computers, he says, they need to get outside and play. In his words, “Sensation has no substitute” (Silicon Snake Oil, p. 138, http://www.amazon.com/Silicon-Snake-Oil-Thoughts-Information/dp/0385419945). But if we create a virtual simulation that feels real to a user, haven’t we found a substitute for “real” sensation?
Technology works on trends, on social and cultural waves I won’t pretend to know anything about (because I haven’t yet read The Tipping Point, http://www.amazon.com/Tipping-Point-Little-Things-Difference/dp/0316346624). Not only do we stick with trends that work—that make life easier, education more effective, economy more efficient—we stick with those that are catchy. In short, we stick with what’s cool until something cooler comes along.
In this week’s Newsweek, Jennie Yabroff talks about the cupcake trend that, over the last five years or so, has brought an American individualist ideology to the dessert sector (read Yabroff’s column at http://www.newsweek.com/id/216053). Yabroff identifies our collective latching-on to childhood icons as laughable, calling dessert an undeserving leader of a cultural paradigm shift. The cupcake, after all, is just a trend, and Yabroff identifies bacon as the next “it” food to follow.
She’s right. I’ve had at least three conversations in the last month that involved the question “Have you heard of Baconnaise?” followed by simultaneous shouts of “Ewww!” and “I would so eat that.” (Check out the latest spread at http://www.baconnaise.com/). I’m left wondering, at what point in a trend does latching on stop being trendy? At this point, cupcake shops are so overdone that opening one would be passé. Baconnaise will have no conversational cache by the end of the year. And, on a completely separate subject, I’ve waited so long to join Facebook—As of early 2008, numbers indicated that clued-in college students were moving on; read more at http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/7257073.stm—that to give in now would be like opening a cupcake store. That trend has sailed.
Technology works on trends, on social and cultural waves I won’t pretend to know anything about (because I haven’t yet read The Tipping Point, http://www.amazon.com/Tipping-Point-Little-Things-Difference/dp/0316346624). Not only do we stick with trends that work—that make life easier, education more effective, economy more efficient—we stick with those that are catchy. In short, we stick with what’s cool until something cooler comes along.
In this week’s Newsweek, Jennie Yabroff talks about the cupcake trend that, over the last five years or so, has brought an American individualist ideology to the dessert sector (read Yabroff’s column at http://www.newsweek.com/id/216053). Yabroff identifies our collective latching-on to childhood icons as laughable, calling dessert an undeserving leader of a cultural paradigm shift. The cupcake, after all, is just a trend, and Yabroff identifies bacon as the next “it” food to follow.
She’s right. I’ve had at least three conversations in the last month that involved the question “Have you heard of Baconnaise?” followed by simultaneous shouts of “Ewww!” and “I would so eat that.” (Check out the latest spread at http://www.baconnaise.com/). I’m left wondering, at what point in a trend does latching on stop being trendy? At this point, cupcake shops are so overdone that opening one would be passé. Baconnaise will have no conversational cache by the end of the year. And, on a completely separate subject, I’ve waited so long to join Facebook—As of early 2008, numbers indicated that clued-in college students were moving on; read more at http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/7257073.stm—that to give in now would be like opening a cupcake store. That trend has sailed.
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