teaching b/log

Black's - definition of plagiarism

2008-01-21T10:34:00.000-06:00

"The deliberate and knowing presentation of another person's original ideas or creative expressions as one's own. Generally, plagiarism is immoral but not illegal. If the expression's creator gives unrestricted permission for its use and the user claims the expression as original, the user commits plagiarism but does not violate copyright laws. If the original expression is copied without permission, the plagiarist may violate copyright laws, even if credit goes to the creator. And if the plagiarism results in material gain, it may be deemed a passing-off activity that violates the Lanham Act." Black's Law Dictionary, 8th ed. (2004), p. 1187. [The Lanham Act, 15 U.S.C., is the federal law regulating trademarks.] From my old syllabus.

387 paper assignment / D R A F T

2007-12-24T16:49:00.000-06:00

Anglo-Irish satirist Jonathan Swift once said, "satire is a sort of glass, wherein beholders do generally discover everybody's face but their own."

Reviewing a theater adaptation of "Lucky You" for Broadway.com , Beau Higgins says Hiaasen's columns at The Miami Herald "have outraged just about everyone in South Florida, including major politicians, law officials and even his own bosses." In "Lucky You," his targets include South Florida developers, religious quacks, redneck militias, white liberals, Hooters and, yes, the newspaper business.

Research Hiaasen, his journalism and his novels. Based on that research and your reading of "Lucky You," write a documented feature article

How does "Lucky You" reflect the ethics of a working journalist? What media trends, practices, etc. does he satirize? What would you consider the moral center of his work?

Hold it down to 1,500 words.

"A Brief Introduction to Restoration and Eighteenth Century Satire," lecture delivered by Ian Johnston in November 1998, in English 200, Section 3, Malaspina University-College in Nanaimo, British Columbia, Canada
http://www.mala.bc.ca/~Johnstoi/Eng200/satire3.htm

COMM 387: Draft goals and objectives

2007-12-22T15:39:00.000-06:00

A. Goals Students will understand the historical development of professional journalism in England and the United States; appraise ethics, principles and craftsmanship in authors who made the transition from journalism to literature; assess the professional ethics, attitudes and craft agenda of professional journalists writing today; and reflect on how these principles and practices can inform their own professional writing.

B. Student Learning Objectives. Upon completion of the course, students will be able:

To discuss the development of journalism in the English-speaking world, from 18th-century magazines to the 19th-century penny press, "yellow journalism," muckraking and professional mass-market news media during the 19th to 21st centuries

To formulate a set of journalistic ethical standards and values, including such principles as accuracy, the verification of fact, objectivity, serving as a watchdog and exposing wrongdoing in powerful institutions; and to compare these values to commonly accepted benchmarks of literary value

To discuss and evaluate common stereotypes of journalists, including those of Ben Hecht [as reflected in His Girl Friday (1940) starring Rosalind Russell and Cary Grant]; Hunter Thompson; and Carl Hiassen, novelist and Miami Herald columnist.

To evaluate the work of literary figures including Daniel Defoe, Charles Dickens, Walt Whitman, Mark Twain and Ernest Hemingway in terms of values, principles and rhetorical strategies they may have acquired as journalists

To evaluate the work of journalists including Richard Harding Davis, Ernie Pyle, Tom Wolfe, Truman Capote, Mike Royko and Robert Fisk in light of both journalistic and literary standards and rhetorical strategies

To reflect on how the values, principles and work product of journalists from 18th-century London coffeehouses to creative nonfiction markets today can help in the formation of their own personal and professional values and principles; and how some of the techniques studied might (or might not) be reflected in their own professional writing

Bloom's taxonomy -- skills-based, too

2007-12-19T11:51:00.000-06:00

The Faculty Center for Teaching and E-Learning at the University of North Carolina Charlotte has Bloom's Taxonomy Objectives for skills-based courses as well as the cognitive domain. Also the affective domain. One to come back to.

J-blogs: Weblogs for J-school students?

2007-12-11T12:20:00.000-06:00

After talking with a couple of students in the news-editorial sequence during finals, I'm going to start posting links to information about how journalism students might use a blog to enhance their careers. The conventional wisdom, at least in academic life, is to stay away from them. Up-and-coming professors have been denied tenure, at least so go the scare stories, because of controversy over their blogs. Middle East expert Juan Cole, who makes no secret of his utter distain for neo-conservative foreign policy, is often cited as an example. So be careful. Be especially careful of satire -- if readers can take something the wrong way, they will. Count on it. They most assuredly will.

But my instinct is certain kinds of blogs might be helpful to people just getting started in the business. ...

Especially appropriate for student journalists, perhaps, would be something like a writer's journal. This is one of those terms that means different things to different people. What I mean by a writer's journal is kind of like a notebook professional writers use to try out ideas, post observations, etc. Something, in other words, an awful lot like the blogs I had my students start fall semester in COMM 337 (advanced writing). Another warning: Don't post finished articles, or even nearly-finished articles, to your blog. Free-lance markets, as a rule, won't touch anything that's been published before. And a few of them might count your blog as a prior publication.

Again, be careful. It's a big, wide, wonderful, dangerous world out there. And the Internet is no less dangerous (and no more) than the rest of it. But you already knew that. Right?

The Helium.com writers' community website collects 15 articles under the heading Tips for keeping a journal like a professional writer. I haven't read them all, but they look very useful. I checked a couple of third-party ratings in an
Pandia Search Engine News webpage and a members' forum with comments by users at Editred.org web. Helium seems kosher, especially for beginners, but not a good way of making money by free-lancing. But in my experience nothing else is, either!

A website called the Internet Writing Journal maintains a list of "The Best Author Blogs" ... check them out. You may find something that's suited

Infed.org is a website put together by a small group of British educators who use it for "exploring informal education, lifelong learning and social action." They have a useful tip sheet "Writing and Keeping Journals" for teachers and education students.

How a band uses 'sticky' website

2007-12-06T11:40:00.000-06:00

A band mixing the sound of Afropop, hip hop, soul and, yes, I can hear a little gospel, Soulfège is based in Boston, now doing a Sweet Mother Africa tour. Infectious music.

Also an awesome example of a band using new media. You've read about "sticky" websites? (If you're not sure, see below.) Well, this is how a well-thought-out sticky website works. Here's the band, in their own words:

So what is Soulfège? Glad you asked. Put it like this - if Fela Kuti, Bob Marley, Lenny Kravitz and Gwen Stefani were all jammin' with the same band, it would be this one.

Fusing funk, reggae, hip-hop, and highlife, Soulfège is more than a band...it's a big FUNKY band.

Electrifying audiences, from Boston to Ghana and beyond, with its positive vibe and relentless groove, the members of Soulfège have performed with and for some of the world's most talented artists and distinguished dignitaries, including Debbie Allen, Janet Jackson, Steven Spielberg, Bobby McFerrin, Nelson Mandela, the Reverend Al Sharpton, Dr. Cornell West, and Al Gore.

The group is known for building sonic bridges that fuse the influences of the African Diaspora into a musical vision all its own. Soulfège not only shines with creativity, it thrills audiences with a golden foundation in rhythm and harmony.

In general, the band tries to present a positive view of life and of culture, both American and African. Frontman Derrick N. Ashong, who is from Ghana, told The Boston Globe the band "was in a position to help change misperceptions on both sides." Says Daniel T. Swann of the Globe:

Soulfege has one foot in Africa, one in America. Its core members -- Ashong, Jonathan M. Gramling, and Kelley Nicole Johnson -- were brought together by their alma mater, Harvard, where all had been in the Kuumba Singers, a gospel choir. But Ashong was born in Ghana, and many of the band's lyrics reflect a connection to the African diaspora. "Yaa (dis be fo radio)," for example, includes lyrics in Ga (spoken in Ghana), as well as in Portuguese and English.

Plenty of YouTube clips and other eye candy -- ear candy? -- on their website. Quotes from and links to the Globe's laudatory story on the band and the SMA tour.

Here's how Erin Jansen's NetLingo.com website defines sticky content:

Information or features on a Web site that gives users a compelling reason to revisit it frequently. Stickiness is also gauged by the amount of time spent at a Web site over a given period of time. This is often maximized by getting the user to leave some information behind on the site, such as a personal profile, an investment portfolio, a resume, a list of preferred cities for weather reports, personal horoscopes, birthday reminders, and the like.

How many sticky features do you see on the Soulfège website? How many do you see on NetLingo, for that matter?

COMM 337 -- final exam

2007-12-04T11:19:00.000-06:00

COMM 337: Advanced Journalistic Writing
Benedictine University at Springfield
Fall Semester 2007

www.sci.edu/classes/ellertsen/comm337syllabus.html

"There are no dull subjects. There are only dull writers." -- H.L. Mencken

Final Examination – Due at 1:30 p.m., Wed., Dec. 5

The Principles of Journalism adopted by the Project for Excellence in Journalism, available at http://www.journalism.org/, say telling the truth “is a process that begins with the professional discipline of assembling and verifying facts. Then journalists try to convey a fair and reliable account of their meaning, valid for now, subject to further investigation.” But words like truth tend to make working journalists nervous. So they tend not to use them. In her autobiographical book “Small Blessings,” Celestine Sibley of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution said “newspapering is dedicated to something important – letting the people know.” Sibley, who covered courts, the legislature and major stories like the murder of Dr. Martin Luther King, said she did it once with “a straightforward recital of the facts, devoid of feeling” (170-172). The story won a prize. And Donald Murray, author of our textbook “Writing to Deadline,” recalled his first prize-winning story, about a suicidal jumper on a window ledge: “I followed the specific detail – the terrifying chant of the crowd [‘Jump! Jump!’ Jump!’]. … I wrote the story with information – specific, revealing details and direct quotations. I didn’t attempt ‘great’ writing, I just tried to get out of the way of the horrifying information” (6). Murray, like Sibley, doesn’t use the word truth. Instead, he speaks of specific details, details and facts.

“I was told [as a reporter] and then learned by public attack and embarrassment that it was worse to spell the name wrong than to charge a person with public lewdness,” Murray adds. “If you got the name of the street wrong, no one trusted anything in the story.” So telling the truth is about getting the facts straight and presenting them to readers with enough context so they can understand them. Write a 1,000- to 1,500-word essay answering these questions:
How important is truthfulness to journalistic ethics? How do Don Murray's recommended reporting techniques, like seeking out surprise or avoiding clichés of vision, and his techniques for telling a story -- finding the “line,” explaining context and organizing a story around a clear narrative – help us get the facts straight and communicate them to our readers? How can they help you in your own writing?

What do other working journalists, or former journalists like Robert Fisk of The [London] Independent and those on the HBO show “The Wire” profiled in The New Yorker, have to say about finding and telling the truth? How can this help you in your own writing?
In reporting and writing your feature stories for Communications 337, what did you learn about interviewing people, getting the facts straight, understanding them in context and putting it all into words on paper (or pixels on a screen) so a reader could understand them? How can it help you as a professional writer?

COMM 337: Quote w/in quote w/in quote

2007-12-03T15:00:00.001-06:00

Posted to my mass communications blogs. --pe

The CNN story was headlined "Why bad kissers don't get to second base." Cute enough. Worth a look. But what I really liked about it was the punctuation in the last 'graph! Take a look:

"The best kisses are always the ones that happen accidentally," observes New York City resident Benjamin Kayne, 25, a digital media sales director. "(Planned kisses) are just tedious, and I'm sitting there thinking, 'Is this over yet? The commercial is over and I'm missing "CSI".' "

That's a quote within a quote within a quote. That you don't see every day.

COMM 337: How much extra credit ... ?

2007-12-02T17:05:00.000-06:00

... should I give you if you cite the article linked below in your final exam for COMM 337?

Email me and let me know what you think. That way I'll know you visited the website during final exam week, even if you don't quote the article linked below in your essay on truth, facts and the responsiblities of a journalist.

But I think you'll find something to think about.

It's an opinion piece in today's New York Times by Clark Hoyt, the "readers' representative" columnist for The Times. Headline is "Fact and Fiction on the Campaign Trail." Interested yet? Facts.

Well, try this. Hoyt's lede:

LAST Monday’s Times reported that Rudolph Giuliani had accused Mitt Romney of having a bad record on crime while governor of Massachusetts.

“Violent crime and murder went up when he was governor,” Giuliani said of his Republican rival.

In time-honored journalistic fashion, the newspaper noted the Romney campaign’s response: No, violent crime, which includes murder, actually went down during Romney’s tenure.

If you were like me, you wondered, impatiently, why the newspaper didn’t answer a simple question: who is telling the truth? I wanted the facts, and, not for the first time, The Times let me down.

OK, OK, a couple of political candidates trashing each other. Happens all the time. But I columnist for The New York Times saying his paper let him down? Now that is news.

No. It's not news, it's ethics.

So who's telling the truth? Says Hoyt:

My colleague Michael McElroy came up with the facts that morning after a 10-minute check of F.B.I. statistics readily available on the Internet. Murder in Massachusetts did go up in the four years Romney was governor, from 173 in 2002, the year before he took office, to 186 in 2006, the last full year of his term. An increase of 13 murders may not seem like a crime wave in a state with a population of 6.4 million, but an increase is an increase, so Giuliani was right on that point.

But violent crime, a broader category made up of murder, rape, robbery and assault, went down in the Romney era, from 31,137 to 28,775, so Giuliani was wrong on that score and the Romney campaign was right, though it failed to mention that robberies had also increased.

Both of them. Neither one of them.

Getting the facts in context is a little harder. Ten minutes harder, to be precise. How difficult can that be?

Something else. Hoyt quotes people who say fact-checking can have a good effect on the political process, and several news organizations in fact (there's that word again) do a lot of it:

Fact-checking the candidates has long been an important part of campaign coverage. When news organizations blow the whistle on false statements by candidates, it tends to have an impact, said Larry Sabato, a University of Virginia political scientist. “I think it’s an extremely valuable role, keeping the players honest.”

Is that worth 10 minutes of a reporter's time?

Spring semester internship opportunity

2007-11-27T12:35:00.000-06:00

Project Return, an ecumenical social service program that works with mothers returning to the Springfield community from prison, can use an intern to work with the director in creating or updating a flier, newsletter, website or other promotional material. (More details below copied and pasted from their informational flier.) They are expanding their services and community education efforts, and this would a good experience for an intern who already has some motivation toward social justice issues and an interest in public relations. Internships are open to mass communications students at Benedictine who have a 3.0 average or better.

The intern would work with my wife Debi Edmund, who is Project Return's new director. Before seeking her master's degree in Child and Family Services at the Univerity of Illinois-Springfield, she was a public relations consultant for the Illinois Association of School Boards and is a former features editor of The Rock Island Argus (where I met her). So she is an experienced communications professional who has combined her mass comm. skills with another line of work.

PROJECT RETURN
Our Mission
Project Return’s mission is to help incarcerated mothers reintegrate into the Springfield community by matching each returning mother with a team of trained and supported volunteers for one year. We also educate the public about the barriers these women face as they seek to make a successful re-entry into the community.

Our Program
Paid staff and trained volunteer Partnership Teams help participants address immediate challenges: complying with the conditions of parole, achieving financial stability, finding immediate and permanent housing, accessing health care, reconnecting with family and friends, and resuming parental responsibilities. Without such support, released inmates are at risk of returning to criminal activity, substance abuse, or other self-defeating behaviors. Project Return hopes to break that cycle, benefiting both the clients and the community. Our comprehensive, individualized re-entry services begin prior to the individual’s release and continue for up to a year after release. Services include assistance in finding or accessing short term and permanent housing, employment, education or employment training, child care, health care, mental health care, counseling and addiction support services, reliable transportation and safety net resources. It is hoped that each participant will leave our program with improved self-esteem, better mental and physical health, and increased self-sufficiency, thus reducing the chances that she will re-offend and return to prison.

COMM 337: Truth & Project for Excellence in Journalism

2007-11-19T11:29:00.000-06:00

The Project for Excellence in Journalism defines itself as "a research organization that specializes in using empirical methods to evaluate and study the performance of the press." Originally affiliated with the Columbia School of Journalism, one of the nation's best, is is now part of the Pew Research Center in Washington, D.C.

Focusing especially on content analysis, the PEJ maintains a website with daily updates on the state of the media. It also posts a Statement of Shared Purpose listing nine principles developed by research project that included 40 forums with working journalists over a four-year period. Among them are several that relate to this question of truth ... including the first principle:

Journalism's first obligation is to the truth
Democracy depends on citizens having reliable, accurate facts put in a meaningful context. Journalism does not pursue truth in an absolute or philosophical sense, but it can--and must--pursue it in a practical sense. This "journalistic truth" is a process that begins with the professional discipline of assembling and verifying facts. Then journalists try to convey a fair and reliable account of their meaning, valid for now, subject to further investigation. Journalists should be as transparent as possible about sources and methods so audiences can make their own assessment of the information. Even in a world of expanding voices, accuracy is the foundation upon which everything else is built--context, interpretation, comment, criticism, analysis and debate. The truth, over time, emerges from this forum. As citizens encounter an ever greater flow of data, they have more need--not less--for identifiable sources dedicated to verifying that information and putting it in context.

Notice how the journalists at PEJ's forums think of truth as a process -- if you do it right, in so many words, you'll get it right.

All nine of the principles are important. Of special interest to us in COMM 337, perhaps, is the seventh:

It must strive to make the significant interesting and relevant
Journalism is storytelling with a purpose. It should do more than gather an audience or catalogue the important. For its own survival, it must balance what readers know they want with what they cannot anticipate but need. In short, it must strive to make the significant interesting and relevant. The effectiveness of a piece of journalism is measured both by how much a work engages its audience and enlightens it. This means journalists must continually ask what information has most value to citizens and in what form. While journalism should reach beyond such topics as government and public safety, a journalism overwhelmed by trivia and false significance ultimately engenders a trivial society.

You will have an opportunity to write about these issues on your final exam. How do the reporting and writing techniques in Donald Murray's "Writing to Deadline" empower us as journalists to tell the truth and get it right.

COMM 337: More viewpoints on truth (and a final exam hint)

2007-11-15T20:11:00.000-06:00

If you start looking for the truth, I'm discovering, it turns out everybody's got an opinion on it. And their brother, their sister, their second cousin once removed and their cocker spaniel puppy, too. (Well, maybe that's not 100 percent true about the cocker spaniel puppy.) But I think it is important. And I think this issue of telling the truth can tie together several things we've touched on in COMM 337:

How do Don Murray's recommended reporting techniques -- e.g. looking for surprise, his interview tips, etc. -- help us learn the truth as reporters?
How do his techniques for telling a story -- finding the "line," explaining context, etc. -- help us communicate the truth to our readers?
What do other working journalists, or former journalists like those on the HBO show “The Wire” profiled in The New Yorker, have to say about finding and telling the truth?
How important is telling the truth to journalistic ethics? Where do you draw the line in an age of shrinking newspaper readership and declining audiences for "mainstream" (i.e. network style) TV news?

Here are some resources I found on the internet:

The current issue (Fall '07) of San José State University's alumni magazine, Washington Square Magazine, asked students and faculty there "What is truth?" Three definitions stood out:

Thomas Leddy, a professor in the Department of Philosophy, said the kind of thing you'd expect a philosopher to say. Abstract, hard to follow, but kinda well reasoned once you think about it a while:

Truth is a triune concept, all sides in constant, necessary, often fruitful, and often harmful conflict. One side expresses the one-to-one fit of elements between the candidate for truth (proposition, picture, etc.) and that to which it is said to be true. The second is best expressed by William James’ idea that truth is that which is good in the way of believing. The third is the quality of heightened reality we experience when we believe we have captured the essence of something (e.g., conceptually or through art). None of these is reducible to any of the others.

Much more practical were the defintions from business and journalism profs. Michael Solt, an associate dean in the Lucas Graduate School of Business, said:

A dictionary definition of truth includes concepts like honesty, integrity, accuracy and conformity with fact. Students, and especially business professionals, understand that long-term success is dependent on such truth. Recent accounting scandals show how short-term deviations from truthfulness do come to light with severe consequences. I am very impressed with how Silicon Valley professionals, including CEOs, entrepreneurs, and venture capitalists, embody these concepts in their daily behavior. While reputation and credibility play a role, I get the sense they believe that “doing the right thing” is actually the best thing for their organizations.

There's plenty there for journalists as well as business people to wrestle with. Best of all (of course), I liked what Richard Craig, an associate professor in the School of Journalism and Mass Communications, defined truth and operationalized it:

Truth is the facts about a situation. Unfortunately, life can take something as seemingly simple as that and complicate it enormously. Do the details of an incident obscure its root causes? Do certain actions contradict previous behaviors or disguise possible consequences? For a journalist, truth is often something that must be unearthed. It’s frequently elusive and sometimes unpleasant, but it’s a reporter’s stock in trade. It emerges when a journalist genuinely works to produce a fair and complete account. It seems somehow appropriate—for journalists, truth is the result of an honest effort.

Now this ...

2007-11-15T11:30:00.000-06:00

I think I'm going to offer this without comment. It's a Reuters story on two Iraq war documentaries. Here's the lede:

LONDON (Reuters) - Two Hollywood directors who are part of a wave of films about the war in Iraq and the broader fallout from the September 11, 2001 attacks have said they were only doing what media failed to do -- telling the truth.

Brian De Palma's "Redacted", arguably the most shocking feature yet about events in Iraq, hits theatres on Friday, using a documentary style to tell the true story of the gang rape and murder of an Iraqi girl by U.S. troops in 2006.

Paul Haggis also based "In The Valley Of Elah", already released, on true events linked to the war, although, unlike De Palma's cast of unknown actors, he employed major stars Tommy Lee Jones, Charlize Theron and Susan Sarandon.

What jumped off the page -- uh, off the screen -- at me was those last three words in the first graf, "... telling the truth."

Read the story. It's short. And while I don't have any particular comment about, I do have some questions:

1. How would De Palma, Haggis and the others quoted in the story define the truth?

2. How do they documentary filmmakers go about seeking the truth (however they define it)?

3. What marketplace pressures make it difficult to tell the truth?

Media, 'context' in Springfield / READING ASSIGNMENT

2007-11-15T11:04:00.002-06:00

This morning's issue of Illinois Times has a cover story and a couple of sidebars on the state of the news media. They fit in with the discussion we're having in a couple of my news-editorial classes, and they're important enough I'm assigning them to all of my mass comm. students. Read them, and be ready to cite them in class discussions, on your blogs and/or your final exam essays. You can pick up a free copy of IT from the newsrack next to the Quiet Lounge in Dawson, or read it on IT's website They tell about the pressure of declining circulation, ownership changes and a gloomy job outlook at The State Journal-Register and WICS Channel 20. All this makes it difficult, according to some of the people quoted, to do a decent, ethical job of covering the news -- writing "the best obtainable version of the truth" in Carl Bernstein's words -- in the dominant media in town. More specialized, or "niche," media in the African-American community and public radio are doing better, according to the sidebars.

There's nothing new in the doom and gloom. Ben Bagdikian, a former Washington Post editor now dean emeritus of the journalism school at the University of California-Berkley, summed it up 40 years ago when he said, "Trying to be a first-rate reporter on the average American newspaper is like trying to play Bach's St. Matthew's Passion on a ukulele: The instrument is too crude for the work, for the audience and for the performer."

True enough (there's that word again). But you've got to try.

This week's stories in Illinois Times tell how things are shaking out here lately, and they're not just for students who want to go into the news business. The trends are national, and they're important for everyone who deals with -- or reads, watches, listens to or surfs -- the media. Which is all of us.

A sidelight. In Amanda Parsons' story on local TV news, there's a little preview of what Benedictine students can expect from Nathan Mihelich, who will teach TV production spring semester. Formerly a Channel 20 reporter, Mihelich is now information director for the Dominican Sisters of Springfield. Says the IT story:

Mihelich will teach a new television-production course at Benedictine University/Springfield College in the spring, and he says he will use his experiences at WICS and other news stations to teach students about the value of investigative reporting, the importance of quality rather than quantity, and how to turn a story into a presentable piece that people care about and may act upon.

Read the IT stories and be ready to discuss them in class next week.

Bernstein (Marqueta)

2007-11-15T10:31:00.001-06:00

Marqueta's post -- moved from last year's COMM 207 blog. -- pe.

"I don’t think that we are going to have such a salutary view of what happened in the Clinton presidency. Clinton’s transgressions have little in common with Watergate, which was about a vast and pervasive abuse of power by a criminal president, who ordered break-ins and firebombings, who impeded the free electoral process, who instituted illegal wiretaps and used the Internal Revenue Service as a force for personal retribution...

I was talking about, about what we do. The rise of idiot culture, which we must resist, is taking place at a time when other institutions in this society, particularly our political institutions, particularly the American Congress, have been failing us, pandering even more shamefully to polls instead of engaging in problem-solving; responding to campaign contributions instead of to the real problems, fears, needs of the people of the country; surrendering too often to demagoguery and irrelevance instead of leading the people"

Berstein is a very 'real' reporter. He speaks on the things that Elite America runs from. Berstein talked about context. I believe that context in this sense deals with 'the given'.

COMM 337: Are reporters doomed? Well, maybe ...

2007-11-13T16:16:00.000-06:00

David Leigh, an assistant editor of the Guardian in London, with special responsibility for investigative reporting, has some glum thoughts for those who don't think newspapering is a dying industry. His headline sums up the tone of the speech: "Are reporters doomed?" His answer. Read it for yourself and make your own conclusion. But I'd say his answer is yes, probably. Says Leigh:

I fear that these developments [various forms of online publication and blogging] will endanger the role of the reporter. Of course, there will always be a need for news bunnies who can dash in front of a camera and breathlessly describe a lorry crash, or bash out a press release in 10 minutes. There will probably be a lot more news bunnies in the future. There will probably also be hyper-local sites — postcode journalism fuelled cheaply by neighbourhood bloggers. But not proper reporters.

You probably figured out how to translate from the British yourself. But a "lorry" is a truck, and British "postcodes" are like our ZIP codes. "News bunnies" needs no translation. But "high street" might be less familiar -- it's like "Main Street" in small-town America.

COMM 337: Journalism and capital-T truth

2007-11-13T12:04:00.000-06:00

Cross-posted from this semester's class blog in COMM 207 (copy editing). It takes up a question we also mentioned in our class Monday: How can we know what the truth is? The answer here, in so many words, is we can't but we obtain something that's pretty close to it if we try hard enough.

So read this post, follow the links and be ready to answer the questions below in boldface. We'll try it in class, and if discussion lags you'll have an opportunity to write about it on your blogs. -- pe

Carl Bernstein, one of the reporters who broke the Watergate story during the 1970s, has a definition that I've liked ever since I first came across it in our copyediting textbook, Modern News Editing by Mark Ludwig and Gene Gilmore (5th ed. Ames, Iowa: Blackwell, 2005). Journalism, according to Bernstein, is "the best obtainable version of the truth" (231). Ludwig and Gilmore add it's "an acknowledgement that the full truth is hard to grab hold of and may shift over time as more facts are revealed."

Turns out Bernstein has been saying it for years. Especially after he and fellow Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward were portrayed in the Hollywood movie "All the President's Men" (1976), Bernstein has been a fixture on the rubber-chicken dinner and lecture circuit. And he gives this definition of journalism to audience after audience. Usually he says it's being undermined by celebrity news and cost-cutting in U.S. newsrooms.

It makes sense to me. I think it makes sense to a lot of people who have covered the news, and who know from the experience how elusive the truth can be. I like it because it doesn't promise too much. It doesn't promise The Truth with a capital "T."

"Truth is the word that summarizes many journalistic ideas," say Ludwig and Gilmore. "But what, philosopy has always asked, is Truth? Working newsmen and newswomen know what truth means on the job and don't worry too much about the big picture, so far as they can discover and portray it." The best obtainable version, in other words, of truth.

Ironically, Bernstein credits Woodward with the phrase. When the two were interviewed by Larry King of CNN, they said:

... it -- but it -- it -- you know, and our concern is that -- and Carl makes this point, and it's a critical one, that the business of this kind of journalism, trying to get to the bottom of something complicated, hidden, scandalous, or important decisions by people who have lots of power, involves lots of sources. Not one source, not 10, but dozens or even hundreds.

BERNSTEIN: You know, Bob said right after Watergate, that really, what this story was about, like all reporting, or good reporting, is the best obtainable version of the truth. And that phrase has always stuck with me about what real reporting is. When we did "All the President's Men," it turned out unintentionally it was maybe a primer on the basic kind of police reporting and slogging and knocking on doors.

They went on from there, on "Larry King Live. But for me the best obtainable version of truth has something to do with "the basic kind of police reporting and slogging and knocking on doors."

In seeking the best obtainable truth, Ludwig and Gilmore suggest journalists look for several things.

The most important is accuracy. "Newsrooms rightly develop a fixation on accuracy about names and addresses. But reporters must be at least as careful about accurate quotation, or about the accuracy of the impression that results from the way facts are put together."

Almost as important is objectivity. Ludwig and Gilmore cite the conventional wisdom: "Reporters should keep themselves out of the story, and editors should see that they do."

Closely related to accuracy and objectivity is fairness. Ludwig and Gilmore have a simple standard for editors: "They treat everybody alike."

Bernstein's rubber-chicken dinner speech, as he gave it Sept. 26, 1998, at the annual convention of the Radio and Television News Directors Association, is available on line. In it he says:

The truth is often complex, very complex. “The best obtainable version of the truth” is partly about context and this is perhaps the greatest single failing of our journalism in media today. For too much of it is utterly without context. Facts by themselves are not necessarily the truth. Thus the gossip press, the tabloids, too much of what we see on the air, even when the facts are somewhat straight, they are often a form of misinformation, because their aim is to shock, to titillate, to distort, to give grotesque emphasis.

How did journalists in the good old days -- which happen to coincide with Bernstein's reporting days -- find the best obtainable version? Bernstein suggests they looked for "thoroughness, for accuracy, for context." Hard to do, he adds, when an "idiot culture" demands 24/7 coverage of celebrities and political foodfights:

The hunger for gossip and trash and simple answers to tough questions in our culture today is ravenous and the interest in real truth, hard, difficult, complex truth, that requires hard work, digging, reporting, is waning In America our political system, and I think we are seeing it now, has been failing and with its failure we have been witnessing as well a breakdown of the comity and the community and the civility, that has traditionally allowed our political discourse to evolve. The advent of the talk show nation, not just on radio, but on television especially, with its standards of the grotesque and people screaming mindlessly at each other on the air is part of this breakdown.

Does Bernstein overdo his critique? Probably. But does he have a point there? Probably. His speech has been covered by the Lawrence (Kan.) Journal-World and the Daily Texan, student paper at the University of Texas in Austin, among others.

It's all about process. When you don't know whether people are telling you the truth or not, what affirmative steps can you take to ensure accuracy, objectivity and fairness? My old city editor used to say, "Pete, if your dear old white-haired grandmother tells you she loves you, don't believe her! Check it out!" Is that a reasonable attitude? What other steps can you take? What would Don Murray (author of the little green book that won't go away) recommend? What do you recommend?

COMM 393: RE: Senior Portfolios/due dates reflective essay

2007-11-09T11:32:00.000-06:00

When you get your formal assignment sheets in Communications 393 (Senior Portfolio), I'll elaborate on the due date for the self-reflective essay that goes with the senior portfolio. But I'm also sending out an email message now giving you a heads-up on it, so you can plan ahead.

The self-reflective essays papers are due Monday, Nov. 26, the first day of the week after Thanksgiving and the week before finals. Email them to me at pellertsen@sci.edu and/or peterellertsen@yahoo.com ... please also include a paper copy of the self-reflective essay in the Senior Portfolio Folder that you leave with me during our end-of-semester conference. I will schedule them later.

2. During the rest of that week, from Tuesday, Nov. 27, through Friday, Nov. 30, I will accept late papers but deduct 10 points -- i.e. a letter grade -- from the grade on the paper.

3. During the week of final exams, I will deduct another five points for each additional day the paper is late -- for a total of 15 points Monday, Dec. 3; 20 points Tuesday, Dec. 4; 25 points Wednesday, Dec. 5; 30 points Thursday, Dec. 6; and 35 points Friday, Dec. 7.

I don't like deducting points for late papers, especially for college seniors. But a few of the students who are registered for COMM 393 have been so irregular in their attendance, I believe I need to set clear deadlines and penalties. In order not to discriminate against anybody, I am obligated to set the same policies for everyone.

If you have any questions, comments or suggestions, please don't hestitate to contact me.

-- Pete Ellertsen, instructor, COMM 393

COMM 337: Assignment for Nov. 16

2007-11-08T16:20:00.000-06:00

The following assignment sheet, together with a hard copy of the article in the Nov. 1, 2007 issue of Rolling Stone, will be handed out in class tomorrow. Students who are absent that day are responsible for securing a copy of the article, either from me or from a library that takes Rolling Stone. -- pe

COMM 337: Beyond Newswriting
Benedictine University at Springfield
Fall Semester 2007

www.sci.edu/classes/ellertsen/comm337syllabus.html

"There are no dull subjects. There are only dull writers." -- H.L. Mencken

Fourth analytical paper (due Friday, Nov. 16). Attached is a profile of environmental scientist James Lovelock in Rolling Stone. It was written by Jeff Goodell, who writes for that magazine and the New York Times Magazine, on the basis of several interviews with Lovelock in Norway and in England. Analyze his story in terms of its news value – timeliness, impact or importance, etc. – and Goodell’s organization and narrative technique.

What is the main point of Goodell’s story? Does he have a nut graf? If so, be sure to quote it. Where is it? If not, how and where does Goodell let his readers know the main point of the story? How does he organize the interviews with Lovelock to support that point? In discussing the things that keep a story moving, Donald Murray, author of our textbook Writing to Deadline, speaks of conflict and tension. "That tension may be between one individual and another; between a new idea and an old one; between an individual and society; between a belief and a newly discovered fact; between what is said and unsaid, seen and unsaid; between the writer and the world; between what is being done and what should be done; between cause and effect; between reality and illusion" (64). How does Goodell develop that tension in this story?

How effective is the story as a whole? Is it newsworthy? Does Goodell develop it so it would interest readers in a general interest magazine like Rolling Stone? Consulting Don Murray’s "Notes on Narrative" (152-55), analyze Goodell’s story for its mastery of the story-teller's art. See how many of the narrative techniques Murray describes you can find. How effective is the story’s ending? Does the rest of the story fully prepare readers for the end?

Please tell Michelle and Christina

2007-11-08T14:21:00.000-06:00

... that I'm trying to send them senior portfolio information by email, but the message bounced.

Thanks a million!

-- Doc

COMM 393: Reminder on Senior Portfolios

2007-11-08T11:07:00.000-06:00

A copy of an email message I sent out this morning to students registered for Communications 393. I'm posting it to my blogs for communications students as well. I have great respect for the Benedictine/SCI grapevine, and I'll appreciate your assistance in getting the word out. -- pe.

A reminder: The end of the semester is only a month away, so it's time to pull together the material for your senior portfolios.

I will need to meet with each of you in order to: (1) inspect your professional portfolio; and (2) receive a Senior Portfolio Folder containing your self-reflective paper and copies of four pieces of work (artifacts) you have done for class, for internships and/or off-campus publications. You will keep your professional portfolio for use in job hunting, but Benedictine University will retain a Senior Portfolio Folder from each student for program assessment purposes.

I am developing a more detailed set of instructions, which I hope to email to you over the weekend, but I wanted to send out this reminder so you can get started how.

THERE ARE THREE parts to the Senior Portfolio procedure:

I. SELF-REFLECTIVE ESSAY. To be turned in, as part of the Senior Portfolio Folder, during a conference with me before the end of the semester.

The self-reflective essay will be 10 to 12 pages in length, in which you reflect on your experience as a communications major at Benedictine in terms of: (a) your progress toward developing or furthering your career goals; (b) your understanding of the profession, its ethics and its role in society. In this essay you should address the following program objectives of Benedictine's mass communications department:

1. Prepare graduates for careers in advertising, electronic and print media, journalism, public relations, publishing, writing or other careers requiring sophisticated communications skills;

2. Prepare graduates for continued study in graduate or professional school;

3. Develop the student's critical and imaginative thinking, reading and writing skills;

4. Develop skills to empower the student to communicate ideas effectively, through speaking, writing and the use of technology;

5. Develop skills for critical interpretation of the media;

6. Foster aesthetic understanding in both production and interpretation of media texts;

7. Develop knowledge of the methods to make responsible social and personal decisions;

8. Develop primary and secondary research methodologies;

9. Develop an understanding of the history, structure and operation of the mass media;

10. Provide an understanding of the impact of mass media industries and messages on the individual, society and culture;

11. Develop professional-level skills in written and oral communication for a variety of media and audiences;

12. Develop professional-level production skills for both print and electronic media;

13. Encourage the development of creative expression; and

14. Help the student develop a professional media portfolio.

II. PROFESSIONAL PORTFOLIO. To be inspected by me during our end-of-semester conference and returned to you. This will be a collection of your best work, preferably gathered in a presentation folder, that you can take with you on job interviews.

III. SENIOR PORTFOLIO FOLDER. To be turned in to me during our end-of-semester conference and retained by Benedictine. Since we will keep these folders, I will accept them in an inexpensive pocketed folder; you can find them in an office supply store or the school supplies aisle of most drug stores. In this folder, you will include: (a) the the self-reflective essay; and (b) at least one copy at least one piece of work (artifact) from each of the following categories:

1. A 300-level research paper written for a 300-level theory class (including COMM 317, 385, 386, 387, or 390, and 391 if it is a theory class). It must contain proper annotation, structure, evidence, and methodology. The student must have attained a grade of at least a “B” on the paper in its original form for it to be accepted for this requirement.

2. A print-based publication, defined as an original written or produced work fixed in a printed and published medium (including newspapers, magazines and newsletters). If you do not have print publication credits, class work for COMM 207, 208, 209, 253 (equivalent to SCI's COM 221), 254, 263 (equivalent to SCI's COM 222), 264, 337, 381 or 382 can be accepted.

3. A web-based publication, i.e. creation that has been exhibited on the World Wide Web and is created for a departmental publication, internship, or work-related experience. The Sleepy Weasel counts as a web-based publication. Any other web-based artifact, including blogs or personal Web pages, must be approved by the instructor prior to the submission of the full portfolio.

4. Brochures, fliers, memos or other work product, including advertisements, pamphlets, brochures, letterheads, scripts or other copy prepared for broadcast, memos, creative briefs, campaign plans or other tangible material written in connection with a college course or an internship.

I will send you a formal assignment sheet in a few days, and there is more detail available about the senior portfolios on the COMM 393 syllabus linked to my faculty page at http://www.sci.edu/classes/ellertsen/masscom/comm393syllabus.html

If you have any questions or comments, please don't hesitate to get in touch with me.

-- Pete "Doc" Ellertsen, instructor

COMM 337:

2007-11-07T11:48:00.000-06:00

Go to Pulitzer Prize website at http://www.pulitzer.org/ and click on the "Archive" link. It will take you to a READ WINNERS and SEARCH page. Click on "SEARCH." In the timeline at the top of the page, click on "2006." You'll reach a page with a directory of winners in all categories. Click on "PUBLIC SERVICE." It will take you to a splash page with the Pulitzer Prize committee's citation, their reason for giving the award. It will say:

For a distinguished example of meritorious public service by a newspaper through the use of its journalistic resources which, as well as reporting, may include editorials, cartoons, photographs, graphics and online material, a gold medal.

Two Prizes of a gold medal each:

Awarded to the Sun Herald, Biloxi-Gulfport, Miss., for its valorous and comprehensive coverage of Hurricane Katrina, providing a lifeline for devastated readers, in print and online, during their time of greatest need.

and:

Awarded to The Times-Picayune, New Orleans, for its heroic, multi-faceted coverage of Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath, making exceptional use of the newspaper's resources to serve an inundated city even after evacuation of the newspaper plant.

Click on the gray tab that says "Works" and then on the link to The Times-Picayune's winning stories. Please note: This is a DIFFERENT batch of stories from the selection I asked you to read and analyze for Friday's assignment. Start now, because the computers are slow today.

Howard Kurtz on perceived media bias

2007-11-06T12:55:00.000-06:00

Cross-posted to my mass communications blogs. -- pe

There's a story in yesterday's Washington Post that we need to read, even though it relates to material we covered earlier in the semester and/or will come back to at semester's end. It's a column by media critic Howard Kurtz on right- and left-wing perceptions of bias in the news media. To sum it up briefly, maybe a little too briefly, Kurtz thinks the media are taking fire from both sides. And he implies, without coming right out and saying it, that's about where you want to be if you're covering the news.

Kurtz has been on the talk show circuit plugging his book on network news, and he said the talk show hosts "appear to be living in parallel universes." His column is a good overview of the issue, concluding:

Bobbing along on this swirling sea of opinions, I became increasingly convinced there is a place for newscasts that at least attempt to provide viewers with a straight set of facts. To be sure, these programs make subjective judgments, sometimes miss the boat and appeal to a demographic keenly interested in all those segments on back pain and hip replacements. But it would be a shame if, in an age of infotainment, the new generation of anchors can't find ways to keep their broadcasts vital as well as balanced. Without them, after all, there would be fewer targets for "The Daily Show" to mock.

Read it. Might be a good one to print out for later use, in fact. I don't know how long The Post archives its stories on the open website.

Links on first-year student retention research

2007-11-05T21:01:00.001-06:00

A $100,000 Lumina Foundation grant-funded study at Ball State University that attempted to answer the question “How do faculty engage first-year students in the classroom?” Directed by Paul Ranieri, acting English department chair and former director of a residence hall program for freshmen. " Some highlights:

Ranieri spearheaded a series of summer workshops over three years starting in 2003. Instructors of core curriculum and early major courses applied to participate by identifying specific teaching challenges they wanted to tackle.
... while the general trend toward higher retention rates and overall grade point averages among students who were in the classes taught by participating faculty is not entirely consistent, the data are “consistent enough through all these different faculty members to raise some questions.”
[While the grant money has been used up, Ranieri said] he hopes to expand a report he’s writing — which tracks retention and GPA data for students who enrolled in the “Lumina” courses as freshmen throughout their college careers — for publication.

Some good stuff on reading in a philosophy course:

David W. Concepción, an associate professor of philosophy, came to the first workshop series in 2003 wondering why “students in courses for some number of years said, ‘I get nothing out of the reading’” (specifically the primary philosophy texts). Discovering through student focus groups that what they meant was that they couldn’t ascertain the main points, Concepción realized that he needed to explain the dialogical nature of philosophy texts to students in his 40-person introductory philosophy course.

Whereas high school texts tend to be linear and students read them with the objective of highlighting facts paragraph by paragraph that they could be tested on, “Primary philosophical texts are dialogical. Which is to say an author will present an idea, present a criticism of that idea, rebut the criticism to support the idea, maybe consider a rejoinder to the rebuttal of the criticism, and then show why the rejoinder doesn’t work and then get on to the second point,” Concepción says.

“If you are reading philosophy and you’re assuming it’s linear and you’re looking for facts, you’re going to be horribly, horribly frustrated.”

So he worked with reading instruction:

Based on the constructivist theory of learning suggesting that students make sense of new information by joining it with information they already have, his guidelines suggest that students begin with a quick pre-read, in which they underline words they don’t know but don’t stop reading until they reach the end. They then would follow up with a more careful read in which they look up definitions, write notes summarizing an author’s argument into their own words on a separate piece of paper, and make notations in the margins such that if they were to return to the reading one week later they could figure out in 15 seconds what the text says (a process Concepción calls “flagging).

Concepción also designed a series of assignments in which his introductory students are trained in the method of reading philosophy texts. They are asked to summarize and evaluate a paragraph-long argument before and after learning the guidelines (and then write a report about their different approaches to the exercise before and after getting the “how-to” document on reading philosophy), turn in a photocopy of an article with their notations, and summarize that same article in writing. They participate in a class discussion in which they present the top five most important things about reading philosophy and face short-answer questions on the midterm about reading strategies (after that, Concepción says, students are expected to apply the knowledge they’ve learned on their own, without further direct evaluation).

Very similar to the tip sheet "Six Reading Myths" from Syracuse that I have linked to my faculty page. My classroom assessments have suggested weak reading skills across the board in all my students, even though our sophomores test at national averages on normed ACT Inc. reading tests. This has been consistent in freshman English, sophomore lit, introductory mass communications and junior- and senior-level news-editorial classes.

Carnegie Mellon has good advice for teaching first-year students on its website for TAs, including a a checklist for covering course objectivesin daily lesson plans. Included are these that relate to reading, or more properly provide students with a context for their reading:

Prioritize 2-3 main points that you want students to leave the room remembering.
If you try to cover much more, the key points can get lost in a flood of details.
In prioritizing, be sure that you can explain why learning each main topic is important.
When you can identify up front why students should learn about a topic, students are often better able to follow the goals, structure, and flow of the class.
Plan classes to complement the textbook, not replace it.
It is useful to check with colleagues in your discipline to see how they connect readings with in-class learning.

More on 9-11 coverage

2007-11-05T11:38:00.001-06:00

David Usborne is the New York correspondent for The Independent, a center-left newspaper in London. He was in lower Manhattan Sept. 11, 2001, and he knew immediately his coverage of the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Centers would be the story of his life. Reading it now, several years later, it brings back the immediacy he tried to convey to readers in England.

At the end of 2001, he wrote an account of how he covered the story and how he felt that day that is, to my mind, one of the best pieces of reporting to come out of that tragedy. He also captured the conflicting emotions and instincts of a reporter covering a very big story in a way that I think any hard news reporter will recognize.

I cannot really describe how I felt then. Everything else – deadlines, cellphones, whatever – drained from my mind. I felt nausea. I suddenly felt terribly frightened. And profoundly shocked. Death is disturbing always, but there are places when perhaps you expect it. A hospital or a battlefield. Foreign correspondents may see it more than most. But this was a beautiful morning in September – in Manhattan. I was correspondent in New York, for heaven's sake, not Jerusalem or Rwanda. Or Belfast. Those jumpers are still with me. Until recently, I could not talk about them without fighting back the need to cry.

The rest of his account relives that day, from the time he rushed to lower Manhattan in the morning to his trying -- unsuccessfully -- to unwind in an East [Greenwich] Village bar shortly before midnight.

Also linked below are:

Usborne's spot news coverage on Sept. 12, 2001.
A story Sept. 18, 2001, by David Lister, also of The Independent, on spot news coverage of the attacks by news media in general.

Read all three stories, and answer the following questions:

1. How do Usborne's accounts of the terrorism that morning in New York City stack up as pieces of writing? Compare and contrast his deadline story that ran Sept. 12 with his year's-end retrospective Dec. 28. What's the same? What's different? What does it tell you about deadline writing?

3. What do you learn from reading Usborne about the ethics and instincts of a journalist? Your careers, hopefully, will involve events that much less dramatic. But there may be some of it you can apply to your own writing. What does Usborne say that you can so apply?

COMM 337: Third analytical paper, due Nov. 9

2007-11-02T11:40:00.000-05:00

For your next analytical paper, I want you to read the New Orleans Times-Picayune's prize-winning coverage of Hurricane Katrina. I can't give you a direct link to the stories, but here's the path.

Go to Pulitzer Prize website at http://www.pulitzer.org/ and click on the "Archive" link. It will take you to a READ WINNERS and SEARCH page. Click on "SEARCH." In the timeline at the top of the page, click on "2006." You'll reach a page with a directory of winners in all categories. Click on "BREAKING NEWS REPORTING." It will take you to a splash page with the Pulitzer Prize committee's citation, their reason for giving the award:

For a distinguished example of local reporting of breaking news, presented in print or online or both, Ten thousand dollars ($10,000).
Awarded to the Staff of The Times-Picayune, New Orleans, for its courageous and aggressive coverage of Hurricane Katrina, overcoming desperate conditions facing the city and the newspaper.
Click on the little gray tab that says "Works." It's second from the left. That will take you to a directory of the stories submitted in this catagory. The top one has a head in all-caps that says "CATASTROPIC." The rest are from the period August 30-September 3. Read them.

Choose one or two, and analyze them like you did the columns by Steve Lopez of The Los Angeles Times and the coverage of 9-11 by staff of The Wall Street Journal. Consulting Donald Murray's "Notes on Narrative" in our textbook (pages 152-55), and analyze the stor(ies) you choose for their mastery of the story-teller's art.

See how many of the narrative techniques Murray describes you can find. Quote them. Quote freely. Quote them. Quote freely. Post your analysis to your blog. Be sure to link to the Lopez column you analyze. Due in class Friday, Nov. 9.

COMM 337: In class exercise for Oct. 29

2007-10-29T11:05:00.000-05:00

Television producer David Simon, the subject of Margaret Talbot's profile of his TV show in The New Yorker, was a reporter for The Baltimore Sun before he left the newspaper business and went to the HBO show "The Wire." What specific attitudes and instincts of a reporter has he taken with him into TV?

[Here's an example, Simon complains about "the bullshit of bean counters who care only about the bottom line." That's typical of reporters, who tend to see the effects of cost-cutting by management, i.e. the "bean counters," as taking away the resources reporters need to do their job right, making them "do less with less." You will find plenty of others as Simon and other newspaper people quoted in Talbot's article talk about their philosophies of life, their ways of getting information out of people, the way they listen to people, their attitudes toward the truth and a wide variety of other matters, large and small.]

In class today: Skim-read back through Talbot's article "Stealing Life," and find three or four passages containing good examples of a reporter's way of thinking on the part of Simon or his former Baltimore Sun colleagues who are working on the show. On the blog you're keeping for COMM 337, (1) quote the passage, (2) explain what you learn from it about reporting and (3) analyze how it can help you in your career as a professional writer and editor.

Since it's on your personal blog, don't be afraid to use your own voice. A couple or three of you are establishing a distinctive way of writing on your blogs that I think you'll be able to include in your portfolios. And most of the rest of you are showing raw talent, and I think everybody who's bothering to post will be able to develop it into the kind of thing you'll be able to show editors and personnel office people before long.

COMM 337: Journaling on Steve Lopez / IN CLASS / REQUIRED

2007-10-25T19:59:00.000-05:00

Blog the following and be ready to discuss in class --

Did you ever wonder why news people always call the stuff they write a "story?" Steve Lopez of The Los Angeles Times has a gift for narrative, for story, and his stories are always based on good reporting. Always.

Let's see how it works. Lopez has been assigned to write color sidebars about the fires in Southern California. (What are color sidebars?) The assignment is a natural for him, since he writes the "Points West" column for The Times and is considered a newsman's newsman ... a guy who knows how to tell a story. In the paper's directory of Lopez' recent columns he has not only stuff about the fires but also a wide variety of stories about people. To one degree or another, they're all based on narrative. Let's find out how he does it.

On your blog, I want you to choose on of his stories and analyze it for narrative technique -- which is just a fancy word for story-telling, right? Consulting Donald Murray's "Notes on Narrative" (pages 152-55), choose one of Lopez' stories in the LA Times and analyze it for his mastery of the story-teller's art.

For example, if I were writing up the story we looked at Wednesday, the one where he interviewed former San Diego fire chief Jeff Bowman about the brush fires, I would focus on the dialog and description. I would notice his use of first person (no matter what they did to the capital "I" on the typewriters at Murray's old paper in Boston)! How many other narrative techniques do you see in this brief quote?

About 8 a.m., Bowman gets a call from his mother's nursing home.

They're evacuating the residents.

"I'll go get her," he tells Denise, and we pile into his truck for a short ride to a nearby neighborhood called Hidden Meadows.

This, I think is pure storytelling, pure narrative. The first person puts us on the scene. There's dialog. The present tense lends immediacy. So do the very short paragraphs. There are bits like that all the way through the story. What other narrative techniques does Lopez rely on? There's a list in Murray.

Your assignment: Pick another story. See how many of the narrative techniques Murray describes you can find in the story. Quote them. Quote freely. Post your analysis to your blog. Be sure to link to the Lopez column you analyze.

COMM 337: Feature story link, Oct. 29 assignment

2007-10-20T20:46:00.000-05:00

Your next 1,000-plus word analysis of a feature story is due a week from Monday, in class on Oct. 29. It's on an article in this week's New Yorker by Margaret Talbot. It's titled "Stealing Life," and it's a profile of television producer David Simon, a former reporter for The Baltimore Sun who now writes and produces the HBO show "The Wire." It's available on line. Hurry up and print it out, because The New Yorker may not archive the story on its website much longer. I also have a print copy of the magazine if you need to photocopy it.

Either way, you should get started reading it now. It's long. I haven't counted words, but 6,000 words is a pretty standard length for magazine features. And I'd say it's at least that. It takes up 12 pages in the magazine.

But it's an excellent story. Talbot is a New Yorker staff writer and a senior fellow of the New America Foundation. She's written for quality publications like Atlantic Monthly and the New York Times Magazine. Her writing, at least this story, is solidly based on in-depth reporting.

What to look for ... and what I'll be looking for in your papers:

Simon's experience at The Baltimore Sun gives him an inside perspective on the newspaper business. What does he say about the past, present and future of newspapering? How is his world view shaped by having been a reporter? How does that experience affect the way he goes about writing the show? What do you learn about the craft of newspapering from Simon?
This year's story line will be about a fictional newspaper that is based on the Sun and even uses its name. Several of the people working with him on this year's "Wire" show are ex-colleagues at the Sun. How do their backgrounds in newspapering shape their world views? What do they say about journalistic standards? How do their professional standards, values and instincts affect the show? What do you learn about journalism in 21st-century America from reading about Simon and his colleagues?
How good a reporter is Talbot? How does she manage to reflect in her writing the subtle flavor of speech in the Jewish community (look for phrases like "keeping kosher" for following Jewish dietary laws), and in people from Baltimore and New Orleans? Cops? Politicians? Street hustlers? Musicians? (Notice, too: They're all interested in language, in listening to people, really listening, so they can get just the right word.) How much of Talbot's story is based on interviews, and how much on direct observation? What does she hear and what does she see that lends versimilitude to the story? What do you learn about the craft of reporting and writing from reading her story?

Week in and week out, some of the best reporting in America appears in the New Yorker. (I'm afraid Simon and his co-workers are right when they say you don't see much of it in newspapers any more.) And Talbot's is one of the better stories I've seen there lately.

Here's an insight I especially liked:

After years of reporting in Baltimore’s ghettos, [Simon] found himself at ease with being the only white person in a room, or the only person in the room who didn’t know how to re-vial drugs, and found, too, that he could channel the voices of people in the game. “To be a decent city reporter, I had to listen to people who were different from me,” Simon explained. “I had to not be uncomfortable asking stupid questions or being on the outside. I found I had a knack for walking into situations where I didn’t know anything, and just waiting. A lot of reporters don’t want to be the butt of jokes. But sometimes it’s useful to act as if you couldn’t find your ass with both hands.”

A warning, though: It helps you keep it covered if you can find it with both hands. Don't ask how I know that.

Another insight. It's gloomy, but unfortunately it rings true. Talbot says:

This final season of the show, Simon told me, will be about “perception versus reality”—in particular, what kind of reality newspapers can capture and what they can’t. Newspapers across the country are shrinking, laying off beat reporters who understood their turf. More important, Simon believes, newspapers are fundamentally not equipped to convey certain kinds of complex truths. Instead, they focus on scandals—stories that have a clean moral. “It’s like, Find the eight-hundred-dollar toilet seat, find the contractor who’s double-billing,” Simon said at one point. “That’s their bread and butter. Systemic societal failure that has multiple problems—newspapers are not designed to understand it.”

Fortunately, reporters like Talbot and magazines like The New Yorker are.

COMM 150, 207, 337: Obit for 'reporter's reporter'

2007-10-15T07:28:00.000-05:00

This morning's Washington Post carries the obituary of a reporter who was shot to death Sunday in Baghdad, apparently by "soldiers from the Iraqi army, believed to be infiltrated by the militia." A sidebar collects appreciations by his colleagues at the Post. "He was a reporter's reporter," says one. "And we all admired his courage."

John Ward Anderson said the reporter Salih Saif Aldin, 32, was tenacious:

Salih loved a scoop, and he reeled in a whopper in the spring of 2005. Like many Iraqis, Salih was deeply committed to justice and democratic reforms. One afternoon, he collared me in the living room of the bureau and, through an interpreter, told an amazing tale of a 37-year-old man in Tikrit who had been arrested by Iraqi police, was brutally tortured and died in police custody.

I was skeptical and told him so. Most important, we needed evidence. He would have to go to Tikrit, hunt down the relatives, confront the police, find the U.S. military officials and get some documentation. There had to be a paper trail, I said. Find it.

Most reporters would hang their shoulders at such instructions. Not Salih. He smiled, and his eyes sparkled. He left for Tikrit the next day.

A few days later, he came back with the story.

And Ellen Knickmeyer recalled he had a reporter's gift for accuracy:

He could be very sweet, deferential, polite and kindly . . . he always called me "Miss," in English. On a trip out of Baghdad last year, he got me past a lot of checkpoints by telling the insurgents I was his mother.

"You couldn't say sister?" I asked him.

"Sorry, Miss, sorry," he said.

Assessment: High-stakes test quote of the day

2007-10-10T23:11:00.000-05:00

From The Independent, a center-left newspaper in London, the quote of the day -- perhaps the quote of the year -- on high-stakes testing. It comes in a story about new secondary school testing standards announced by the Labour government, raising mandated proficiency levels on the GCSE tests taken by 11-year-olds nationwide. Said Jovan Trkulga, a supply (substitute) teacher at Deptford Green primary in Lewisham, south London:

"High-stakes testing has got to a ridiculous state... it is making children unhappy. Telling teachers they have to improve their children's performance is like teaching your grandmother to suck eggs."

British GCSE tests measure students' mastery of the national General Certificate of Secondary Education curriculum. The government, which is more directly involved in curriculum than the U.S. government, today announced tighter new standards in math and English:

The new targets will mean ministers expect 53 per cent off youngsters to obtain five A* to C grade passes at GCSE – including maths and English – by the end of the decade. At present, only 45 per cent do – although this figure has risen from 35 per cent in 1997.

In addition, ministers have repeated their target of getting 85 per cent of youngsters to reach the required standard in national curriculum test for 11-year-olds by the end of the decade. Previously, this target had been set for 2006 but it would need a five percentage point rise in English and nine percentage point rise in maths to achieve the target.

Sounds a little bit like No Child Left Behind in the U.S., doesn't it? So does the reaction:

Teachers' leaders breathed a sigh of relief after it emerged ministers planned a bigger increase in education spending than had previously been forecast. However, they warned that the targets could lead to more "teaching to the tests", with the danger that more pupils could be put off learning.

COMM 337: Robert Fisk interviews Osama bin Laden

2007-10-08T21:34:00.000-05:00

On Wednesday I'll have an assignment sheet for your first analytical paper, on a piece of public affairs reporting by British correspondent Robert Fisk. In the meantime, here's a link to the piece I want you to read ... it's a chapter from his book The Great War for Civilisation: the Conquest of the Middle East. In it he tells about the three times he has interviewed Osama bin Laden.

(The "s" in the title is CQ. Fisk is British, and he uses British spellings.)

Fisk writes for The Independent, a center-left newspaper in London. He has lived in the Middle East since the 1980s, and he is a fierce critic of U.S. and British foreign policy in the region. He is no less critical of Israel, and he has been accused of anti-Semitism. I don't think those charges have been proven, at least not by my definition of anti-Semitism, but you should be aware of the controversy over his writing.

In a perceptive review of The Great War in The New York Times, English author Geoffrey Wheatcroft says Fisk "is one of the most controversial journalists of the age, winner of numerous prizes, much admired by some, including colleagues who respect his obsessive attention to detail and sheer physical courage, execrated by others because of what has been seen as his open hostility to Israel, America and the West." Wheatcroft says the book is much too long, and Fisk's "ungovernable anger may do his heart credit, but it does not make for satisfactory history." But when Fisk sticks to straight reporting, Wheatcroft says, The Great War is "a stimulating and absorbing book, by a man who speaks Arabic, who has known the region better than most and has met the leading players, from bin Laden to Ahmad Chalabi (who offered to introduce him to Oliver North)." Fisk has reported, quite literally, on one war after the other since he was first posted to the Middle East in 1982.

"This is really several books fighting each other inside the sack," says Wheatcroft.

Another reviewer, a former British ambassador Libya, Luxembourg and Greece named Oliver Miles, agrees Fisk's book is "excessively long ... a real War and Peace, but with precious little peace." (We're reading about 25 pages out of 1,283.) In his review in The Guardian (U.K.), Miles says, "Vigilant editing and ruthless pruning could perhaps have made two or three good short books out of this one." But when Fisk isn't venting his opinion, his reporting is masterful. Says Miles, "His forte is straight reporting, such as his three interviews with Osama bin Laden."

COMM 337, 393, 207, 150: News or Fark?

2007-10-08T21:30:00.000-05:00

Cross-posted from my Mackerel Wrapper blog, with some comments about the midterm in Communications 150 deleted.

Jack Shafer, who writes the Press Box media criticism column for Slate.com, has a review of Drew Curtis' new book, It's Not News, It's Fark: How Mass Media Tries To Pass Off Crap As News. Intriguing title? I picked up a copy a couple of weeks ago at Springfield's friendly local neighborhood big box book store, and the book's worth reading. Or at least knowing about.

But what the f--- is fark?

Shafer says it's "[a]ll the garbage the press publishes and broadcasts when it runs out of genuine news." He provides a link to the first chapter of Curtis' book,where Curtis explains the origin of the term in more detail. Fark is also a website at www.fark.com. It's an aggragator, which means it consists mostly of links to other websites, most of them mass media sites. It's hard to classify. Tonight's for example, links to stories about a British teenager who ran "up £1,175 bill by text-messaging votes for herself in online beauty contest in order to win £100 in makeup"; a governor in Brazil who banned "use of the present participle. Yep, you read that right"; and an Episcopal church that "bestow[ed] blessings on cats and dogs" on Oct. 4, the feast day of St. Francis of Assisi, in Bangor, Maine.

If you're really, really into cat pictures, be sure to check out the blessing of the pets in The Bangor Daily News. Otherwise you can safely ignore all this stuff. That's Curtis' point. And Shafer's.

Says Shafer, in terms that remind me of Neil Postman's take on television news:

... High-octane blends of fark contain celebrity news, press coverage of itself, and news served in the context of no context. When Shepard Smith screens, say, five seconds of a burning skyscraper in Brazil, followed by five seconds of a cat rescue in Montana, followed by five seconds of a flood in Thailand on the Fox News Report, you're sucking his fark.

Curtis is irreverent, and sometimes he isn't above taking cheap shots. But he has some dead-serious points to make:

... Whenever Mass Media is really fulfilling its intended purpose, generally something bad is going on. Wars, blown elections, bad weather, you name it -- when people need to know something, it's probably because it's likely to kill them. We'd be much better off living in non-interesting times.

This presents a problem for Mass Media, however, when we are not living in interesting times. This has been further compounded by the advent of twenty-four hour news channels and the Internet as a news source. Back in the days when TV news concentrated most of its resources on one half-hour blocks of news, finding material to fill the time slot wasn't difficult. Nowadays cable news networks have to scramble to have something to talk about for twenty-four hours a day, even when nothing of important is going on. Sales departments are still selling advertisements, after all. Mass Media can't just run content made entirely of ads (with the possible exception of the Home Shopping Network). Something has to fill the space.

Over the years Mass Media has developed several methods of filling this space. No one teaches this in journalism school; odds are Mass Media itself hasn't given much thought to the process. It's a practice honed over the years by editors and publishers, verbally passed down from one generation to the next. They're not entirely aware they're doing it, although the media folks who read advance copies of this manuscript all had the same reaction: "I've been saying we should stop doing this for YEARS."

Some media people even feed him copy, anonymously, of course, if they want to keep their jobs. Says Curtis:

One interesting thing about Fark is how many Mass Media people comb Fark for story ideas, not just for radio but for television, newspapers, and Internet media outfits. Once we switched to Google Analytics for Web traffic tracking we discovered that the number one highest-traffic corporate Internet hitting our servers was CNN. Number two was Fox News. Mass Media even submits a lot of their own articles to Fark, sometimes with taglines so outrageous it's hard to believe these are the same people who run Mass Media. I can't even give any examples; it would be too easy to track back to the source and get people in trouble. The most I can tell you is that it happens multiple times every day. And we really appreciate it.

But also notice that some of the media people who hit the Fark website seem to be looking for material ... for, yep, fark they can fill their newscasts with too. How does all this relate to the social responsbility theory of the press?

COMM 150, 207, 337, etc.: Where the jobs are

2007-10-04T14:44:00.000-05:00

Cross-posted to my mass comm. blogs. -- pe

In Communications 207 (editing for publication) this afternoon, we got off on a tangent about lobbying ... mostly because of a front-page picture in today's State Journal-Register showing people leaning on the third-floor rail of the state Capitol rotunda where lobbyists often gather.

Most comments from COMM 207 students were neutral and process-oriented. "I don't really know much about lobbying." Or a general sense lobbyists influence the government to take action on things. But some reflected a negative attitude often heard about lobbying, one that's characterized by the American League of Lobbyists as a "caricature" of "portly, cigar-smoking men who wine and dine lawmakers while slipping money into their pockets."

Even more than most stereotypes, the caricature is unfair. In fact, adds the ALL:

Simply put, lobbying is advocacy of a point of view, either by groups or individuals. A special interest is nothing more than an identified group expressing a point of view — be it colleges and universities, churches, charities, public interest or environmental groups, senior citizens organizations, even state, local or foreign governments. While most people think of lobbyists only as paid professionals, there are also many independent, volunteer lobbyists — all of whom are protected by the same First Amendment.

Lobbying involves much more than persuading legislators. Its principal elements include researching and analyzing legislation or regulatory proposals; monitoring and reporting on developments; attending congressional or regulatory hearings; working with coalitions interested in the same issues; and then educating not only government officials but also employees and corporate officers as to the implications of various changes. What most lay people regard as lobbying — the actual communication with government officials — represents the smallest portion of a lobbyist's time; a far greater proportion is devoted to the other aspects of preparation, information and communication.

What's more, the Lobbyists' league has a code of ethics. Linked at the top of the ribbon at the left of its webpage, no less.

The main thing to know about lobbying, especially for those of us who have or plan careers in Springfield, is the associations that lobby the Illinois Legislature are one of the important employers of communications professionals in town.

COMM 337: Objective bio of Seymour Hersh

2007-10-03T14:47:00.000-05:00

I had to wade through a lot of biased writing to find it, but I finally located a fairly objective profile of Seymour Hersh, writer for The New Yorker who says President Bush wants to bomb Iran (a charge the White House dismisses but doesn't exactly come right out and deny). It's by Howard Kurtz, media critic for The Washington Post, and it came out in 2004. It only comes to three pages in printer-friendly format, but it says pretty much the same thing as the 20-page Columbia Journalism Review profile I linked below -- Hersh is controversial and opinionated, but he's a tireless reporter and he usually gets his facts straight.

Kurtz, typically, doesn't offer his own opinion. But he quotes two journalists who can offer an informed opinion on Hersh's work:

"A lot of Washington journalists act like hedge-trimmers or pruning shears," says Time defense correspondent Mark Thompson. "Sy is a noisy, smoke-spewing chain saw -- and a relentless stump-grinder, to boot."

Bill Kovach, who once edited Hersh as the [New York] Times's Washington bureau chief, says that "he's maintained a kind of groundfire of anger at abuses of power unlike any I've ever seen."

And how does Hersh unearth his information? "He's relentless," Kovach says. "He's rapid-fire. He asks two or three questions at a time. He just keeps going and going until he gets where he wants to go. He religiously tracks these sources, he talks to them all the time."

You can read Kurtz' article and come to your own conclusion about Sy Hersh, but for my money Thompson's bit about the chain saw has got to be one of the all-time great quotes.

COMM337: Assignment for Friday

2007-10-03T10:53:00.000-05:00

In a press conference Tuesday, President Bush's press secretary declined to comment on reports by Seymour Hersh in The New Yorker that Bush plans to bomb Iran. Instead, she cast doubt on Hersh's use of anonymous sources in the New Yorker article. His use of sources is a controversial issue, and it involves his reporting and writing techniques; for Friday, I want you to read his article and evaluate how his use of anonymous sources affects his credibility.

By class time Friday, plesase read Hersh's article "Shifting Targets" and answer the following questions:
How many anonymous sources does Hersh use? Does he describe them in a believeable way? Does he explain why they aren't speaking on the record? Do they seem to have good information? How do they affect his credibility?
Does Hersh's story seem opinionated, or does it sound objective? Does he try to give both sides of debatable issues? Does he back up his claims with evidence? Can you determine from what he writes how careful his reporting was?
Please post your answers as comments to this post.

Some necessary background follows:

This week's flap. According to Dan Froomkin of The Washington Post (who is outspokenly critical of Bush), White House Press Secretary Dana Perino dismissed "questions about Hersh's piece from CNN's Ed Henry and CBS's Bill Plante." Froomkin quoted from the White House transcript of Tuesday's press briefing:

Perino: "Look, you know, I'm glad you brought it up. Every two months or so, Sy Hersh writes an article in The New Yorker magazine, and CNN provides him a forum in which to talk about his article and all the anonymous sources that are quoted in it."

Henry: "So the President --"

Perino: "The President has said that he believes that there is a diplomatic solution that we can use to solve the Iranian problem. And that's why we're working with our allies to get there."

Plante: "That's what he said before we went to Iraq, too."

Henry: "But what's the -- can you answer actually on the substance of whether or not the White House asked -- I mean, if it's not true, then you can say Sy Hersh is wrong and CNN was wrong to air it. You could say that, but --"

Perino: "We don't discuss such things, Ed."

Henry: " -- what about the substance of whether we --"

Perino: "We don't discuss such things. What we have said and what we are working towards is a diplomatic solution in Iran. What the President has also said is that as a President, as a Commander-in-Chief -- and any Commander-in-Chief -- would not take any option off the table. But the option that we are pursuing right now is diplomacy."

Henry: "But the article very specifically said that this summer in a video conference -- secure video conference with Ambassador Crocker, the President said that he was thinking about 'hitting Iran' and also --"

Perino: "I'm not going to comment on -- one, I don't know. I wouldn't have been at any -- at that type of a meeting. I don't know. I'm not going to comment on any possible -- any possible scenario that an anonymous source, you know, continues to feed into Sy Hersh. I'm just not going the do it."

Two things are clear from this exchange. One is the White House is out to discredit Hersh. The other is the White House doesn't care for leaks.

Fromkin suggests a third, that Perino "refused to respond to any of the specific claims Hersh made in this week's New Yorker about White House support for a new path to war with Iran." However, if you read Froomkin very much, he has no use for Bush and he 's strongly opposed to Bush's conduct of the War on Terror.

Controversy over Hersh's reporting. Sy Hersh is no stranger to controversy -- or to the use of anonymous sources -- ever since he won the Pulitzer Prize in 1970 for reporting on the My Lai massacre and its coverup in Vietnam. Froomkin says Hersh "has a history of well-sourced, groundbreaking reporting." And that view is common within the profession. But Froomkin is hardly an unbiased observer.

So I'm linking the Wikipedia profile on Hersh. It clearly has been edited by people who have strong opinions about him, both for him and against him, but the nature of Wikipedia is to get into he-said, she-said counterpoint on controversial subjects. I'd read it more for the extremes of opinion, and seek balance elsewhere.

One lengthy, but balanced and detailed profile of Hersh appeared in The Columbia Journalism Review in 2003. It comes to 20 pages printed out (in a printer-friendly format no less!), but it's the best thing I've read on a very controversial and very important reporter.

COMM 337: Read this, you @#$%!

2007-10-01T19:22:00.000-05:00

As we read good writers -- other good writers (see yesterday's blog below) -- to improve our own writing, we not only read them, but read them for style ... read them analytically, asking ourselves questions like, "How did they do that? And how can I do it better?" Here, to get us started, is a column by Mark Morford on the SFGate.com website. He comes out twice a week in the print edition of The San Francisco Chronicle, but he's primarily an online writer. "His writing," according to Wikipedia, which hits the nail on the head this time, "is sometimes controversial and almost always non-journalistic in style, attitude and tone." How can it be non-journalistic if it's on a journalists' website?

Read the linked column. It's about fast food ads, and it's headed "Eat This, You Fat, Sad Idiot." Ask yourself the following questions: (1) Is he insulting his readers, or giving them a sly pat on the back? (2) What things about Morford's style of writing appeal to you, and what things turn you off? (3) How well suited would you guess his style is for readers in San Francisco? For online readers irrespective of location? (4) How would Morford's column fly in a conservative, Midwestern town like Springfield? With older readers? With people in your demographic? Could it be toned down without losing its appeal? We'll discuss them in class, and you'll write an analysis for your blog. Link to the column, and post your thoughts between now and Monday. (That way you'll have the weekend to catch up.)

Morford, according to Wikipedia, has taught Vinyasa yoga classes and is a two-time winner in the online segment of the annual contest of the National Society of Newspaper Columnists.

COMM 337: Ledes, in-class exercise

2007-10-01T11:11:00.000-05:00

One good way we can improve our writing is to read other good writers. (Notice I said "other good writers," so you'll have that to live up to?) Today's assignment is in that spirit.

After reviewing Don Murray's discussion "Qualities of an Effective Lead" (Writing to Deadline 93), find a story with an effective lede on a newspaper website, post a link to it and analyze what makes it effective -- post the link and a paragraph of analysis as a comment on this message.

(Notice something else? I'm setting up this assignment so you'll have an opportunity to review what Murray says about effective ledes. Clever, huh?)

Be ready to talk in class about your story, too. We'll take a look at some of the stories you found and how we can use the techniques their writers used.

You should remember how to post a link, but here's a reminder:

How to Post a Link
I like to do this with two windows open, one to the page I'm posting the link to and the other to the comment (or create post) field in Blogspot. Here are the steps:

In the address field in the header, highlight the address (or URL). Copy it.
Go to the comment field. Type in <a href="
Paste in the address with no space between the "less than" and the address.
Type "> with no space between the address and the quote mark.
Type in whatever words you want in the link, for example Link here
Immediately after those words, type </a>
Your link should look this this <a href="address">Link here</a>

COMM 150, 207, 337, 393, etc. --sportswriting

2007-09-29T10:47:00.000-05:00

Cross-posted to all my journalism blogs. -- pe

I surfed into this column by ESPN Page 2 sportwriter Scoop Jackson while I was "reading the paper(s)" on the Web this morning. It was linked to Jim Romenesko's blog on newspapering. I don't follow sports very closely (other than Illinois Statehouse politics). So I'm not familiar with Jackson. But this time he was writing about a meeting he had with high school journalism students in Kansas, and he headlined it, "A Fresh Perspective on Sportwriting." I think some of you will enjoy it.

Jackson says the kids had been studying his writing, and they came at him with a depth of knowledge and interest:

They came with it. Straight -- no chaser, no ice, no water back. They didn't ask about how this person was or what type of person that person was. What's Shaq like in person? Have you ever met Tom Brady? Is AI as cool as he seems? Who do you think is going to win the World Series? Is Derek Jeter really that cute in real life? None of that. They didn't come with the standard, star-obsessed questions that sportswriters usually get when we walk into a school full of young girls cute like Kaley Cuoco and young guys smooth like Shia LaBeouf.

Instead, they asked about the writing. The art of storytelling and meeting deadlines. Angles and ideas. They asked about the seriousness of what it is that we sportswriters do and how we approach our craft differently every day, so that we can continue to generate interest. They came authentic.

And Jackson came back at them with candid answers. I liked the way he said, "that sports journalism, just like sports itself, is a business first -- that the writer's goal is to provide meaningful content and the job of the company that employs us is to make money." My sport was politics, and that's how it was back in my newspapering days -- I was working for a business, and my job was to make the politics meaningful for my readers.

And I liked what Jackson said about writing. Like this:

... I told them -- as I had once written -- that nothing I write will ever be considered for "The Best American Sports Writing" because of how I write, but that should never be a writer's goal: "Learn to enjoy the process of writing and the end results will take care of themselves." My mouth to their ears.

I told them that as writers, we should believe in the craft first, self second. In that order. Always.

He recommended the kids read widely, "that expanding their reading base beyond sports will make them better writers because -- as much as we'd like to think it is -- life is not all about sports." He even suggested a reading list, which I'll let you read in his column.

And I especially liked what Jackson said about editing, and being edited. One thing you get used to when you're a professional writer is having editors change your copy. And one thing you have to learn is the humility to realize when they've made it better. So I liked this bit:

Before I left Blue Valley Northwest in Overland Park, Kansas, Matt (one of the two students who sent me the e-mail that initiated this whole thing), still with the smile on his face that appeared the second I walked from backstage to surprise him at 8:30 a.m., said something to me.

"Scoop, you know the [New England Patriots and coach Bill] Belichick piece you just did? The one titled '22 Questions?' Well, I read it a few times and you actually have 25 questions in the story not 22."

"No sirrr," I said back. "I made sure there were 22 questions in that piece. Trust me, there's exactly 22."

"Sorry," he said while handing me a copy of the story he had marked up, as if he were already an ESPN editor. "There's 25, Mr. Jackson. I counted."

Which I knew he did. He was thorough like that. I knew he was right because I now knew that's who he is. That he didn't want to test me or check me, just make sure that in his eyes and in the eyes of every other student in the school I remained the best writer I could possibly be, that I remained his inspiration -- which is why his teacher knew I should meet him in the first place, why she wanted me to meet all of them.

COMM 337: Storyline on Carl the cat

2007-09-28T11:18:00.000-05:00

Please see also linked stories and in-class assignment below. -- pe

Posted to the Anchorage Daily News' website at 3:56 a.m. today was a wrapup on Alaska's martahon trial over custody of an orange tabby cat that lived in an insurance office.

Mat-Su borough correspondent Andrew Wellner opens what I'll bet he hopes is his last story on the trial with a crisp lede that looks ahead to something he hasn't reported yet. It's about the only thing he hasn't reported yet, in fact, since he posted a brief story on the verdict as soon as the jury came back at 3 p.m. yesterday:

PALMER -- Carl the cat is coming home to Palmer.

After deliberating nearly three days, a Palmer jury decided 11-1 Thursday to award ownership of the 7-year-old orange tabby to Catherine Fosselman, owner of a local accounting firm.

Then he uses the rest of the story to give a storyline of the case.

Important tangent: A storyline is not just a rehash of what happened. It's more like the plot of a short story. It's what Don Murray calls the "line." There's even a Wikipedia article that defines a storyline as the "narrative of a work, whether of fictional or nonfictional basis," and, more elaborately, as a set of "narrative threads experienced by different but specific characters or sets of characters that together form a plot element or subplot in the work of fiction. In this sense, each narrative thread is the narrative portion of a work that pertains to the world view of the participating characters cognizant of their piece of the whole,and they may be the villains, the protagonists, a supporting character, or a relatively disinterested." While the Wikipedia article speaks only of fiction, it's pretty clear Murray has this kind of thing in mind when he speaks of "line" in a story.

Back to Carl the cat. Welner has a nice bit of scene-setting for the verdict: "The courtroom gallery was packed; the audience included two judges, court clerks, attorneys and others who'd been following the four-day trial." And he managed to find a juror who was willing to talk about the deliberations.

Also to give him what has to be one of the all-time great quotes on any courthouse beat anywhere:

"There was just so much stuff to sift through we needed a scoop ... like the kind you use to scoop out a litter box," said juror Carrie Wininger, squinting in the sunlight on the courthouse sidewalk.

She said the jury was split evenly after the first day of deliberations and by Thursday morning only one juror had switched sides. The votes of at least 10 of the 12 were needed for a decision.

Wininger said the jurors spent the three days primarily debating the law that applied to the case.

But to her, the choice was clear. She said she never changed her pro-Fosselman vote. The most convincing evidence, she said, was testimony that Carl lived at the office for six years and [plaintiff Debbie] Fosselman's company records that show expenses for taking care of the cat.

"You don't have something for six years and take care of it just because," Wininger said.

As to serving on a jury to decide who owns a cat, Wininger said it didn't seem too far-fetched to her.

"I've got four pugs and two cats and two rabbits," she said. "I know how attached you can get to animals and for me I thought that wasn't so unreasonable."

That last quote isn't half bad, either. Nor is the way he works in color and background without calling attention to himself. The juror squints in the sunlight, for example. And he's able to tuck away the procedure at the bottom of the graf announcing the 11-1 verdict. (He has to, too, because a 11-1 vote in a criminal court case would be a hung jury. Right?) There are other nice bits of detail further down in the story.

COMM 337: Verdict on Carl the cat

2007-09-27T21:05:00.000-05:00

My conscience tells me we shouldn't be spending time on this ... but a civil court jury in Palmer, Alaska, has awarded custody of Carl the cat to the owner of an accounting firm that was gutted by fire in 2006. The ADN posted a brief report to its website at 4:01 AKST (which would be 7 p.m. our time). Carl, an orange longhair tabby, goes back to Catherine Fosselman, owner of Fosselman Associates. She sued former employee Staci Fieser, who had been keeping the cat since shortly after the fire.

The case took longer to decide than many murder trials. Testimony began Thursday, Sept. 20, and continued through Monday. Final argument was Tuesday morning, and the case went to the jury that afternoon. In Wednesday's paper, Mat-Su correspondent Andrew Wellner said, "A highly conservative estimate is $4,000 to pay the judge, clerk and jury for the four-day trial."

Wellner reported Wednesday:

The trial as it unfolded was a topic of conversation throughout the courthouse on Gulkana Street [in Palmer]. Clerks, lawyers, front-door security guards seemed amused or baffled that it was even happening. A group of about a dozen spectators have been a regular presence in Judge Eric Smith's courtroom.

Closing arguments packed the gallery.

More so than testimony, which tended to be muted and may have reflected a desire by witnesses not to take sides in the custody fight, final arguments hinted at what the conflict was really about. Wellner said:

Eric Conard, attorney for the Fiesers, in his final plea to the jury Tuesday morning said the case isn't really about a cat. It's about a vendetta Fosselman carried out against Fieser for leaving the firm. Testimony from witnesses on both sides painted Fieser as a talented, thorough accountant.

Fosselman is a bully, Conard said, who attacked the Fiesers with a $100,000 lawsuit. To hammer home his point, Conard stepped from the lectern to the defense table and pantomimed beating his clients over the head with a sheaf of papers.

"Take that, Fiesers, coming after you for a hundred thousand!" he shouted.

The play-acting was part of a larger performance punctuated by banging the jury rail and stomping his feet. He incorporated a brief musical interlude that featured Conard flourishing his hands above his head, dancing from side to side and singing, in part, "I own Carl."

Fosselman's attorney, Andrew Robinson, was noticeably more subdued, spending most of his time behind the lectern.

If anybody acted outrageously it was the Fiesers, Robinson explained to jurors. They had the audacity to put themselves ahead of Fosselman and the 30 company employees with emotional ties to Carl.

"To say that this case was motivated by bad will on (Fosselman's) part is totally unsubstantiated," Robinson said. "This thing was motivated by the Fiesers and their utter disrespect for the employer that gave Staci her first job in Alaska."

Many witnesses testified to Carl's magnetism and charming habits -- his penchant for bottled water, how he played with visiting clients' pets, his habit of drowning stuffed animals in the office toilet.

Final arguments in this case also suggest why small-town courthouses are known for their theatrics everywhere.

Your assignment in class:
1. Read the stories in the ADN. There are about a half dozen linked to each other, but you may do better by entering keywords "Carl" and "cat" in the paper's internal search engine. Evaluate the coverage of the trial in terms of the "Qualities of a Good Story" that Don Murray lists on pages 71-72 of "Writing to Deadline." Also review "What is News?" by Rich Cameron of Cerrito College's online journalism program. Any list of the common elements of news value or newsworthiness (timeliness, proximity, conflict, etc.) will do -- they're pretty standard. But Cameron's discussion is better than most.

2. Analyze the Carl the cat story in terms of its basic newsworthiness and Murray's discussion of what makes a good story. Be specific about which specific elements of this story relate to specific elements of news value -- for example, does Carl's habit of "drowning" stuffed animals in the toilet enhance the appeal of the story? Or is that just something cats do? Look at some of the comments posted by readers on the ADN website, too, and they may give you ideas about the story's human interest (feline interest?) value. How important is this story? What emotions does it stir up with readers?

3. Post a good, detailed paragraph or two of your analysis as a comment to this blogpost, read your fellow students' comments and be ready to discuss in class.

COMM 337: Wednesday's assignment

2007-09-26T11:05:00.000-05:00

Tonight is the Mayor's Cup, a major soccer game between Springfield College and Lincoln Land Community College (directions and other details below) at the SASA fields on the University of Illinois-Springfield campus. It will be preceded by a tailgate party.

Your assignments.

1. Cover tonight's game and/or the tailgate party. Write a "color story," in other words a story that tells about the game but doesn't just tell who won, what the score was, etc. You can, and should , also go into SCI's rivalry with Lincoln Land, our athletic program, the students who turn out for the game, how it fits into student activities, etc. Write 1750 to 1,000 words. Due Monday.

2. In class today, find a sports story on the Internet that goes beyond the immediate game and interviews people -- players, coaches, managers and/or fans -- about the team, the season. Post a link to the story as a comment to this blogpost. I'll show you how below. As time permits, we'll look at your posts in class.

Directions to the Game
Details on the game:

Tailgate (burgers and brats) will be ready at 6:00pm (FREE) – Game starts at 7:00!
Admission is $3/ person, but Students get in FREE w/ a current student ID!

SASA Complex
4600 11th Street

Directions are available on line at http://sports.sci.edu/msoccer-links.htm#bb-directions

How to Post a Link
I like to do this with two windows open, one to the page I'm posting the link to and the other to the comment (or create post) field in Blogspot. Here are the steps:

In the address field in the header, highlight the address (or URL). Copy it.
Go to the comment field. Type in <a href="
Paste in the address with no space between the "less than" and the address.
Type "> with no space between the address and the quote mark.
Type in whatever words you want in the link, for example Link here
Immediately after those words, type </a>
Your link should look this this <a href="address">Link here</a>

If you can't attend tonight's game, you can make it up by writing a color story about any SCI or other athletic event.

COMM 337: Links to your journals

2007-09-24T20:12:00.000-05:00

Final list (finally). Please make a note of the *permalink for this post, because this will be our roster and a portal to the journals you keep on the blogs you created.

Quinn Allen untitled (qa-vs-qsa)
Michele Bearss untitled (writing4weenies)
Jeremy Cook COMM 337 Advance Journalism
Eric Craddock eric
Shalon Davis untitled (shalonspot)
Jeremy Dixon Jeremy D's Blog
Whitney Drobnack untitled (com337mwf1200)
Terah Ellison COM 337 Journal
Jeff Hall Journalism
Ben Harley untitled (vicious_apathy)
Deanna Jones untitled (Ms. Jones)
Zach Kirchner Advanced Journalism 337
Mitch Ladd The Best Blog Names Are Taken
Meghan McCarthy meghanmccarthy
Gina Moscardelli Blogger Gina
Christina Ostermeier untitled (5568blog)
Robert Schwartz Advanced Journalism Writing
Marqueta Stewart queta-marqueta

_______________________
* A permalink is a permanent link for a blog post. Explains the techterms.com website, they allow us to bookmark a blog post so we can come back to it later, even after "the posting is outdated and no longer present on the home page."

COMM 337: Finding Murray's "line" in a TV series

2007-09-24T11:08:00.000-05:00

When Don Murray, late author and Boston Globe columnist, speaks of the "line" of a story, he has in mind something like the thesis of a student term paper. But to professional writers, finding the line is much more of an organic process than what Miss Thistlebottom taught us in English class. It's also much harder to describe.

Murray comes close when he says it's "a fragment of language -- sometimes a single word, often a phrase or series of words, rarely a sentence -- that makes me follow it. " But he clear about one thing -- when he finds the line, that's the moment when I know [I] have a column" (65). He also suggests, in the chapter subhead, it has something to do with the tension in a story, "the tension between forces in the world that will produce a story." It's about conflict, he said, but it's subtler than that. "That tension may be between one indiviudal and another; between a new idea and an old one; between an individual and society; between a belief and a newly discovered fact; between what is said and unsaid, seen and unsaid; between the writer and the world; between what is being done and what should be done; between cause and effect; between reality and illusion" (64). It can be as blatant as a barn burning (a form of political expression in some parts of the South where I used to live) or subtle as a missed appointment.

When I was covering the courthouse beat for daily newspapers, the line of a story was usually my lede. Often it came to me in headline form: "Three charged in drug raid," or whatever. Other times it was in the subtly troubled relationships between politicians in upper Rock Island County and those from Moline and the city of Rock Island. Murray says:

I do not pursue the line as much as put a tail on it. I am the private eye following suspect who may saunter through a shopping mall or race along a mountain road. My job is to stay in sight, out of sight. I follow language to see where it will take me, inluencing the text as little as possible.

Again, the process is intuitive. Murray describes it by analogy because it's not rocket science, it's not a precise series of steps.

In class today, we will watch the Public Broadcasting Service's extended preview of "The War," the 15-hour series directed by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick that is airing on PBS stations nationwide this week. It's available on YouTube if you want to see it again at home.

As you watch, ask yourself what was "the line" of this series? What insight -- or insights -- made the show hang together as Burns and Novick researched the show? What were they looking for? (They discuss how they made the series in the trailer. They don't use the word "line," or at least I didn't notice it, but they are clearly ) What were the points of tension they focused on? How did they pursue the line? Please post your thoughts to your blog between now and Wednesday.

Some background: Rick Atkinson, critic for The Washington Post, says in his review of Burns' series "The War," it is a "compelling, flawed gem of a documentary, which enriches our emotional comprehension of an event second only to the Civil War in its enduring resonance in the national character."

Of the reviews I've read of "The War," Atkinson's impressed me for its awareness of its visual impact:

Perhaps "The War" is best viewed as one views an art exhibition, focusing on the pictures and not on the captions or the curator's exegesis. The narrative is just scaffolding for the images, many of which linger long after an episode ends: the vivid color footage of flamethrowers on Saipan; the photo of pedestrians strolling past a smoking body next to a burning city bus; the group portrait of butchered soldiers in the dead of winter, their frozen eyes open and lightly dusted with snow, like macabre Jack Frosts.

Here, too, are enduring brush strokes: women climbing on their knees up the steps of Our Lady of Mount Carmel Catholic Church in Waterbury, grateful to God for the Japanese surrender; or the Jewish GI who kept his dog tags with the little "H" stamped on them -- for "Hebrew" -- inside his glove so he could quickly toss them away if captured by the Germans; or the Marine on Peleliu using his bayonet to extract gold teeth from a Japanese soldier not yet dead. A woman from Mobile, recalling the sight of caskets lining a train platform in St. Louis, asks, "How could you not cry?" How not, indeed.

If "The War" is occasionally turgid, so is "Beowulf." Such is the risk of epic. ...

You don't get many epics on TV.

COM 337: Attendance / READ AND POST / MANDATORY

2007-09-23T18:06:00.000-05:00

Due to excessive absenteeism that makes it impossible for us to maintain continuity and cover the required material in class, the following revised attendance policy will go into effect as of Monday, Oct. 1: Each student will be allowed two (2) unexcused absences over the balance of the semester; one (1) point will be deducted from your final grade in Communications 337 for each unexcused absence beyond that number.

Excused absences must be approved by the instructor prior to the class period missed. In exceptional circumstances in which a student cannot foresee the necessity of missing class, I will accept a written, corroborated explanation of the circumstances after the fact; you should, however, keep such ex post facto excuses to a minimum.

AS YOU FINISH READING THIS NOTICE, PLEASE POST A COMMENT TO THE POST CONFIRMING THAT YOU HAVE READ THE NOTICE AND UNDERSTAND ITS CONTENT.

COMM 337: Cat saga continues

2007-09-22T08:35:00.000-05:00

Two new stories on The Anchorage Daily News' website today covering the saga of Carl the cat in civil court in Palmer, Alaska. The first, posted at 3:20 p.m. AKDT, established nobody was certain who owned Carl. After two days of testimony, trial recessed for the weekend and resumes Monday.

You need a program the players straight. Instead, the ADN provides a useful background graf (well, two grafs) right after a summary lede:

Catherine Fosselman, owner of the accounting firm, is suing a former employee, Staci Fieser, and her husband, Jason Fieser, for the return of Carl, along with $100,000 in punitive damages. Trial started Wednesday with selection of a 12-member jury. Fosselman testified Thursday, and her lawyer, Andrew Robinson, has concluded his case.

According to employees, Fosselman retrieved Carl from the burning building, neglecting other items of value to her and her company, and gave him to Fieser for safekeeping. Fieser took him home, and he’s lived with the Fiesers ever since.

Friday morning's testimony established that several people took care of the cat, one of two that lived in the accounting firm's office. It also established that Fosselman stopped taking him home for weekends "after he peed on her bed."

Testimony continued Friday afternoon, and the ADN filed an update at 1:52 a.m. today. It is shorter, but includes a good, readable background graf:

By now, details of the cat fight are well known to those following the case:

Carl was brought to the accounting office as a kitten by a former co-owner and adopted by the staff. In 2006, fire destroyed the office. According to testimony, Fosselman retrieved Carl from the burning building, neglecting other items of value to her and her company, and gave him that night to Fieser for safekeeping.

He's been with the Fiesers ever since.

A couple of things I like about this bit. It's brief, it's clear and it features an irresistable pun on "catfight."

A footnote. If you were wondering what "Mat Su" means (and even if you weren't), it's not a Chinese recipe. It's an abbreviation for Matanuska-Susitna Borough, a county named after two rivers that flow together just north of Anchorage.

COMM 337: Quotes and description

2007-09-21T21:19:00.000-05:00

Moved from my blog The Mackerel Wrapper for students in COMM 150 and 207.

When you can't be on the scene of a story, you have to get the who's, where's and what's through interviews. You'll never get as much detail as you would if you were there, but you can get enough to convey a sense of what it was like.

This CNN account of the shootings at Virginia Tech in April, posted to the web that day, fills in a lot of the gaps by quoting eyewitnesses. For example the lede:

BLACKSBURG, Virginia (CNN) -- A gunman who killed at least 30 people in one of two shootings on the campus of Virginia Tech was dressed "almost like a Boy Scout," said a student who survived by pretending to lie dead on a classroom floor.

"He just stepped within five feet of the door and just started firing," said Erin Sheehan, who was in one of the Norris Hall classrooms where the second shooting incident took place.

Sheehan described the gunman -- who later shot and killed himself, according to police -- as a young man wearing a short-sleeved tan shirt and black ammunition vest.

"He seemed very thorough about it -- getting almost everyone down -- I pretended to be dead," she said. (Watch student describe surviving by playing dead )

"He was very silent," said Sheehan, one of only four students in her 25-student German class who were not shot.

The gunman left but returned in about 30 seconds. "I guess he heard us still talking," said Sheehan.

"We forced ourselves against the door so he couldn't come in again, because the door would not lock."

The man tried three more times to force his way in and then began firing through the door, she said.

The story is a "sidebar," i.e. a story that runs off to the side of the main story and elaborates on it, so it doesn't have a nut graf. Instead, it quotes other witnesses all the way through to give us an overall picture of the scene. Note how this one has a little less information than than the first:

Student Tiffany Otey was taking a test inside Norris Hall when the shooting began. She and about 20 other people took refuge behind a locked door in a teacher's office.

Police officers with bulletproof vests and machine guns were in the area.(Watch a student's recording of police responding to loud bangs )

"They were telling us to put our hands above our head and if we didn't cooperate and put our hands above our heads they would shoot," Otey said. "I guess they were afraid, like us -- like the shooter was going to be among one of us." (Watch students react to shooting )

The quoted details get fewer and fewer as we get deeper and deeper into the story. In this sense it's a classic inverted pyramid, with the most interesting stuff on top trailing off to filler on the bottom. The last graf, for example:

Before Monday, the deadliest mass shooting in the United States occurred in 1991, when George Hennard drove a pickup truck into a Killeen, Texas, cafeteria and fatally shot 23 people, before shooting and killing himself.

Please note: I left in the links to audio and video links in the CNN story, since they're such a good example of cross-platform convergence.

COMM 337: Interview assignment

2007-09-19T11:43:00.000-05:00

Final draft due Monday, Sept. 24. Interview a classmate (we'll make time at the end of class today) about a time he or she was really surprised by the way something turned out and learned something important from the surprise. This is not a particularly easy assignment: I want you to recreate the event through quotes and descriptive writing, using details you get from the interview. So you're not only interviewing for who-what-when-and-where, you're also drawing your classmate out and getting them to remember the details. What was the weather? What was the setting? What did it look like? What did it feel like? Who was there? What did they say? The trick to this assignment is to get the person you're interviewing to describe things, to take down what they say and quote it back.

The story: A 750- to 1,000 word narrative focusing on what your classmate learned from the surprise. I'd give it a soft lede, sort of a narrative: (1) a little story for an attention-getter; (2) the lesson learned in the nut graf; (3) the body of the story, which will be mostly narrative and description.

I think you'll do best if you approach this story in stages: (1) Do the initial interviewing today. (2) Write up as much of it as you can before class Friday, and make a list of "holes in the story," questions you didn't think of at first but need to explain things now. (3) Ask any follow-up questions on Friday. (4) Do the final draft over the weekend, and turn it the finished product Monday.

I post examples of news-feature stories that do this to the blog. In the meantime, you will get some ideas by reading the Boston Globe story by Richard Knox, and Don Murray's analysis of it, on pages 140-45 in the textbook.

COMM 207, 337: Student press furor

2007-09-18T11:01:00.001-05:00

Cross-posted to my journalism blogs.

Content advisory. The subject matter of this controversy is offensive to many readers.

A student newspaper in New Britain, Conn., is in the news for a joke about locking a "14-year-old Latino girl" in a closet and urinating on her. The editors say they're within their First Amendment rights to publish it -- and the consensus is they're probably quite correct about that -- but the incident raises questions about professional standards and student journalism.

The cartoon appeared in last week's edition of The Recorder, student paper at Central Connecticut State University. It is difficult to describe, but The Hartford Courant made a creditable effort when it broke the story last week:

The comic strip printed in Wednesday's edition features a triangle-shaped figure talking on the phone with a square figure. When the triangle tells the square that his urine smells funny whenever he eats a certain cereal, the square asks if his urine tastes funny, too.

"I dunno," the triangle replies. "I'd have to ask that 14 year old Latino girl tied up in the closet."

In one of the panels, a chain can be seen over a closet door, and a voice from behind says "I'm hungry" in Spanish.

Underneath the comic, a message from the paper's editors says, "The Recorder does not support the kidnapping of (and subsequent urinating on) children of any age or ethnicity."

This is strike two for the student paper, the Courant noted. Last school year it published what was intended to be a satire praising rape as a "magical experience" for "ugly women."

Central Connecticut State president Jack Miller has come under fire for not cracking down on the paper, but he says he has to balance interests at a public, tax supported university. "While I recognize that the Recorder's right to publish is secured by the First Amendment and a broad range of judicial court decisions, I must say that I am offended by the decisions of the editorial staff, and Mark Rowan in particular. ... "I share the concerns of my Latin American colleagues and students and others for the hurt inflicted by the editor's decision to run this offensive cartoon."

I have to sympathize on both counts. The First Amendment does protect offensive speech, but I also think the paper was highly unprofessional.

The Hartford Courant, arguably Connecticut's most influential daily, summed up its attitude today in an editorial headlined "Recorder Hits The Gong Again." The Courant said controversy can be a good thing if it's in a good cause, but neither the rape column nor the earlier cartoon remotely qualify. "Both used questionable, insensitive and crude humor to demean women. They also appear calculated to generate controversy for its own sake. As such, they're a morally empty exercise; the literary equivalent of sticking one's tongue on a street sign in winter and reading aloud from the First Amendment."
The Michigan Daily, a independent student newspaper in Ann Arbor, Mich. Opinion page blogger Gary Garca also noted The Record's past lapses and adds, "The cartoon is not only degrading and humorless, it has no point. Offensive speech just for the sake of being offensive is unproductive and hardly the point of the First Amendment. While some of the responses have been a little dramatic, including that from the university’s president who wants to cut off advertising (which would essentially shut down the paper), this type of material shouldn’t be accepted."

One last point. Latin American women don't call themselves Latinos. They're Latinas. So the cartoon is not only tasteless and demeaning. It's ignorant.

COMM 337 - Wednesday's assignment

2007-09-17T21:42:00.000-05:00

Here it is in writing: Take one of the observations or potential story ideas that you or one of your classmates posted to their blog, and speculate about how you would go about writing a story on it. What angle would you take? Who would you talk to? What would you ask them? Read the part about interviews in Don Murray's chapter on "Reporting for Surprise." Toward the end, he interviews a reporter on how to do interviews. How, specifically, could you use that reporter's tips in conducting your interviews? What problems might you anticipate in interviewing somebody on your subject? What would you do to prepare for the interviews? Post a paragraph or two in answer to these questions to your blog before class Wednesday.

Here's a link to our directory of class blogs. It has links to most of them.

By the way, I'm glad to see more people posting to the blogs today. I'd been getting a little worried about several of you. There's still plenty of time for everybody to get caught up, even though some of you have quite a bit of catching up to do. But we've been in school almost a month now, and the semester isn't going to last forever. If you're not one of the three or four people who have been keeping up with assignments, it's time to start getting caught up!

COMM 337: Surprise, 'people-watching' and story ideas

2007-09-16T17:13:00.000-05:00

Since I was assigning you guys to do a list of 25 story ideas like Don Murray's list of observations in a supermarket (Writing to Deadline 16-17), I decided I'd better do the same. In addition to jotting down quirky little things I noticed that might be developed into a story, I also started free associating right off the bat ... as I saw things that reminded me of stories I've read before, that I might be able to spin off in a new direction. So I stuffed a napkin in my shirt pocket, kept it there all weekend and scribbled down ideas as they came to me. The resulting list:

Sacred Harp "singing" at Christian County Historical Society. Why there?
How do Midwesterners get interested in Sacred Harp singing? It's a Southern tradition of old-time gospel singing, very old-fashioned and folk music-ish.
What is a Sacred Harp singing like? I've seen stories based on interviews at individual singings in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and the St. Paul (Minn.) Pioneer-Press. (A lot of writers keep what they call a "swipe file," clips of stories they might be able to do themselves someday.)
Does anybody sing for fun anymore? Why? Why not?
Portapotty next to 1820s log building on CCHS grounds.
How do you get a portapotty? Why? What are the regulations? Where do you rent one?
Is "portapotty" a trade name?
Volunteers setting up chairs, brewing coffee, helping in kitchen, etc. What does it take to put together a statewide singing convention?
Married couple from Sheffield in England. They're Sacred Harp afficionados ... on a two- or three-week vacation in the U.S., going on from Illinois to singing conventions in Colorado, New Mexico and Texas.
Southerners dressed up, e.g. wearing dresses, shirt and tie, starched white shirt, Midwesterners in T-shirts and Birkenstocks
Variety of down-home and major metro yuppie food at potluck -- ham and beans, barbecued chicken, church basement-ish casseroles, hummus bi tahini, vegan casseroles
Singer playing kaen (a wind instrument from Thailand made of one- to three-foot lengths of reed pipe). She is a returned Peace Corps volunteer who lives in Chicago.
Combines out. What kind of a crop year for corn and beans has it been?
Sign at Rochester city limits honoring high school science fair winner in addition to athletes
Business sign in Rochester for orthodontist, "Where Braces are Fun." How can that be!
Mural showing Abraham Lincoln and Martin van Buren painted on old grain elevator
Fiberglass cow from "Cows on Parade" outside restaurant on North Grand Avenue
___th anniversary of Cows on Parade promotion in Chicago (I did a Google search, and Cows on Parade was in 1999)
Chicago cows at State Fair in 1999
Traces of Chicago at the State Fair ... the "et'nic village" features Chicago restaurants and it seems like stage shows of traditional dance, etc., from half the ethnic churches in Cook County. Jamaican roots band called Waterhouse ... front man is an ethnomusicologist.
"Original Red Coach Inn horseshoe"
Horseshoes as Springfield "delicacy" (??) ... does anybody still eat these things? Who? Why?
Origin myths -- north end taverns vs. Leland Hotel
North end tavern food
The north end -- is any of it still distinctive in an increasingly homogenized, Wonder Bread culture?
I just did a keyword search on "Wonder Bread," and discovered a Wikipedia entry saying the U.S. manufacurer is having financial problems. Since Wikipedia is not always reliable, I am going to keep my eye on the Wonder Bread story for a while. If it stands up (i.e. isn't corrected by an irate PR person for the manufacturer in the next few days), I could use the product's apparent loss of market share and financial stablity to peg several trend stories on whole-grain, organic breads, changing taste in foods, etc. Wonder Bread has been a bland, white, middle-class icon for my generation.
Waggin Tails shelter -- an "evergreen" that gets profiled every few years in SJ-R, Illinois Times. It's a no-kill shelter with a lot of volunteers -- what do they do? why do they do it? what do they get out of it?
African American father and daughter in "kitten room"
Little girl and kitten -- do we choose our pets, or do they choose us?
Why a separate room for kittens?
How many cats are there in the sheleter? I count at least 30. What are the logistics of having 30-40 cats in the same building?

Some of these would make excellent stories. Others would go "pffft!" and vanish as soon as I tried to ask somebody the first question. Most of them, probably all of them, look pretty lame when you see them in a list like this. But if you start looking up background and interviewing people, any one of them could turn into a really interesting story. They're all about people, and dreaming up story ideas is nothing but old-fashioned "people-watching" focused on a specific objective.

One rule I try to make for myself when I'm brainstorming. There's no such thing as a bad idea. I don't want to censor myself. Like everybody else, I've got a little creep who sits on my shoulder and tells me, "Lame, lame. Nobody's going to want to read that." If I listen to him I'll never get anywhere, so I'm open to lame ideas. My own and other people's as well. Which leads me to my second rule. There's no such thing as an idea that's so good it can't be improved on. Especially when I'm brainstorming in a group, the best ideas often take shape when somebody says something kind of half-baked and somebody else takes it, changes it just a little bit and it turns into something absolutely brilliant.

As we look at each other's lists in class today, remember Rule No. 2. Read them over, choose an idea or two that seem especially do-able and suggest how you might go about turning them into a story -- who you might interview, what you'd ask them, how you might modify it a little bit and so on ... Post your suggestions as comments to each other's lists.

COMM 337: Surprise! Surprise!

2007-09-12T10:55:00.001-05:00

Post to your blogs --

How does Donald Murray define "surprise?" You'll want to skim through Chapter 3, "EXPLORE: Report for Surprise," before answering this. He doesn't really define it, but he has several brief quotes you might want to include in your blog post.

How can you adapt Murray's concept to your own writing? In other words, how can you report for surprise? Hint: I think it has something to do with always being ready to be surprised.

Here's an example of how I might go about blogging it ...

So I'm sitting in a little family restaurant on 9th Street, throwing cholesterol bombs into my stomach (No. 3 on the menu, scrambled, corned beef hash, wheat toast) and wondering how I'm going to explain what Don Murray means when he says, "The constant awareness of the working journalist is not a mystery. It is something that can be learned and practiced" (35). And in the booth in front of me, I'm aware of a couple of guys with one of those tourist-y maps of Route 66 spread on across the table between them. The kind with little pictures of the Cozy Dog Drive-In and all the other tourist spots along old U.S. 66 between Chicago and St. Louis. Back in the day, it ran down 9th Street. They're in their mid- to late 30s, I'd say, and one of them is wearing a tan knit shirt with "RSPCA" embroidered on the sleeve.

With that, I start to get interested.

The only RSPCA I know of is the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, in England.

So I listen a little more carefully, and darned if one of the guys with the Highway 66 map doesn't have a British accent.

Do I have a story? I don't know yet. But I know how to find out. All I'd have to do is introduce myself, comment on the map and start a conversation. If my hunch is correct and they're Brits who are following old U.S. 66 from Chicago to Los Angeles, I could do a five-minute interview on the spot. I already know the old highway attracts occasional pilgrims from Europe, and I can get on the Internet later to fill in the background.

Anyway, that's what I think Murray means by surprise. If my hunches pan out, I've got a story. Just by keeping my eyes open, and being ready to be surprised.

But even though it's my assignment, it's your blog. So take this assignment, turn it around and adapt it to your own style, your own voice. Surprise me.

COMM 337: Reporting ... ABC, BBC, NHK poll

2007-09-10T11:34:00.000-05:00

The subtitle. title of this course was supposed to be "beyond newswriting." See! There it is on our syllabus. But we keep coming back to the basics -- reporting, in other words -- because you never get beyond reporting.

In the news today, along with the political news about U.S. involvement in Iraq, is a poll by ABC News, the BBC (British Broadcasting Corp.) and the Japanese broadcaster NHK that finds "deepening dissatisfaction with conditions in Iraq, lower ratings for the national government and growing rejection of the U.S. role there."

At least in the U.S., it's what we call a sidebar story, one that kind of stands off to the side of the main news about Gen. David Petraeus' long-awaited report on the U.S. military "surge" in Iraq.

This time the sidebar has a sidebar of its own, a story on how the poll was done. I think it's a masterpiece of reporting.

Read it, and we'll discuss it in class.

A couple of things to think about: (1) How does this kind of reporting give a different view from that of the Iraqi priests who spoke at Springfield-Benedictine? How is it the same? (2) Should American media join with the Brits and Japanese to do a poll that some observers would say undercuts U.S. foreign policy in Iraq? Why? Why not? What are the principles to be balanced here?

COMM 337: Weekend blog assignment

2007-09-08T08:13:00.000-05:00

Something to keep you busy and happy over the weekend ... also (and primarily) a review of your reading assignments in our textbook.

Re-read Chapters 1 and 2 of "Writing to Deadline" by Don Murray. Post to your blog a paragraph or two in answer to each of these questions:

1. Murray identifies and passes on several tips or processes that have helped him as a writer, starting with his habit of "writing" away from his desk (i.e. figuring out how to organize what he writes, word choices, etc.), on pages 16-17. Analyze your own writing processes as a communications student and therefore an apprentice professional writer, and compare them to Murray's. What tips can you pass on to other professional writing students?

2. What specific ideas in Murray's discussion of his writing practice and his interviews with staff writers for The Boston Globe can help you with your own writing? What specific ideas or anecdotes in their stories can help you develop your own sense of professionalism?

Read the chapters over the weekend, post a draft to your blog by class Monday and have a final draft of your post completed and edited by Wednesday.

COMM 207, 337: Newspapers, news and the internet

2007-09-05T21:02:00.000-05:00

Cross-posted to my masscomm. blogs. -- pe

Here's one from a guy you should get familiar with, media critic Jack Shafer of the electronic magazine Slate.com. This column on how newspapers serve up a steady diet of leftovers from their internet editions is especially timely for students in Communications 207 (editing for publication) because it updates the chapter on news editing and copy flow we read for Thursday, but it's important for all of us.

What does the future hold for newspapers? That's anybody's guess, but you'll be able to guess better after you read Shafer.

And it will affect all of us, even those of you who have no intention of going into the newspaper business (or like me who have no intention of going back to newspapering). The news business still sets a lot of the standards for the communications industry. So it's worth knowing.

Besides, questions like this -- what does the future hold for newspapers? -- have a way of popping up on midterm and final exam essay tests.

Read it, and be ready to discuss in class.

COMM 337: Newswriting review -- the lede

2007-09-04T21:09:00.001-05:00

I've decided we have two groups of people in Communications 337 who could use a quick-and-dirty review of COMM 209 (basic newswriting), at least the part on how to write a lede and "hang" a story from it.

First, the two types of people:

Students who haven't had COMM 209 yet and haven't studied how to organize a news story. The inverted pyramid is the basic building block.

Students who've had COMM 209 and have forgotten how to organize a news story. The inverted pyramid -- of course -- is still the basic building block.

Actually, now that I think of it, there's a third category:

Students who've had COMM 209, who remember the inverted pyramid and still could benefit from a review. And it goes without saying the inverted pyramid -- I'll bet you can see this coming by now -- is still the basic building block.

I think that covers all of us. So here goes.

For my money, the best, clearest explanation for beginners is by Lawrence Surtees of the Toronto Globe and Mail on the "SSN Newsroom" website for Canadian journalism students. Read it carefully, several times, too, and you'll understand how to organize a news story. You'll also start developing a feel for when to use a hard lede, when to use a soft lede and how to craft a lede that introduces the key elements of the rest of the story. Surtees also has an excellent tip sheet on "How to Write a Great News Story" that goes into this business of hard and soft news stories in a little more detail. I've assigned it once already, but it wouldn't hurt to read it again.

Here's something I learned from my first city editor, the late Dick Smyser of The Oak Ridger, a daily in Oak Ridge, Tenn. Dick told us to think of four or five keywords that had to be in the story. "Four die in flash flood," or "City council raises taxes." Those words would be in the lede.

Here's another link. A journalism student named David Cohn has an explanation of why some of us spell it "lede" in his blog DigiDave. It's basically so you don't get "lead" (the leading part of the story) it confused with "lead" (the metal). Cohn also has an example of what "Little Red Riding Hood" would look like with a hard news lede:

"A 10-year-old girl and her bed-ridden grandmother escaped death yesterday after a woodsman hacked open a cross-dressing wolf that swallowed them whole."

Try it. Choose a fairy tale or well-known story, and write a hard-news lede for it. Post it as a comment to this blog.

COMM 150, 207, 337, 393, etc. -- "30" and career advice

2007-09-01T09:13:00.000-05:00

Cross-posted to all my blogs.

Found while surfing The San Francisco Chronicle's website SFGate, a "30 piece" by outdoors writer Paul McHugh with a bit of advice for any young people considering making journalism a career." He sums it up in three words:

Go for it!

The column, which ran in the print edition Thursday, was McHugh's last. He's retiring after 22 years on the outdoors beat.

"I'm about to fold my tent and take a hike," said McHugh. "And yes, I do mean that literally."

Like many journalists, McHugh said he's proudest of the stories that exposed abuses and helped correct them:

One great part of a newspaper job is that it awards permission to ask questions and seek answers. I've focused on trying to wield that power well, particularly while facing folks who didn't seem inclined to answer. This job hasn't been only about fun; I've striven to address real resource and public-access issues.

On a few occasions, I've been able to perform investigative work that's at the heart of our journalistic mission. I broke up a cabal of the heedless and malfeasant, helping Asilomar become a well-managed funding source for our state parks department. I ushered an abusive administrator out the door of the California State Parks Foundation, and helped that organization to revive. Fighting for the public felt fabulous. If any of you young folks out there should feel tempted to join the right honorable crusade of journalism, here's my best advice: Go for it! You are needed. Especially if you have the insight and multimedia skills to help journalism re-invent itself for this new century.

McHugh says, "Humanity's age of exploration, of adventure and of existential challenge is far from over," even though the present isn't very inspiring. Again, his advice sums up in three words: Go for it! He adds:

History's overarching lesson, as far as I can tell, is that a time of ease ought to be used in steady preparation for times of hardship or calamity ahead - which will come to us in their turn, as surely as sunrise. If periods of ease are used only to grow soft and indolent, then after calamity returns, you'll have to shoulder more blame than you might want.

Something worth thinking about.

But what's a "30 piece?"
Back in the days when newspapers received their news over the telegraph, the custom grew up of keying in "30" at the end of a transmission. So "30" came to stand for the end of the story, and a "30 piece" came to stand for a writer's last bylined column. Nobody ever types "30" at the end of a story anymore (except occasionally an overeager public relations intern ending their first press release), but it's a bit of nostalgia that still lingers. Like this:

-- 30 --

COMM 337: "Anatomy of a High School Dropout"

2007-08-31T12:21:00.000-05:00

Don Murray, author of our textbook, is the subject of an odd story titled "Anatomy of a High School Dropout" in an online education magazine. (Odd for our purposes, at least, because it's written by an educator rather than a journalist.) It's by Jeanne Jacoby Smith, a specialist in rhetoric and composition pedagogy who decided "the very things that gave Murray grief in school were those that won him the Pulitzer Prize."

I was always interested in the story, because I like Murray and because I never saw a whole lot of point in school either, at least not till grad school (but that's another story and not a very interesting one). But I never looked in the Jacoby Smith piece for anything that might help my own writing until today. Then I needed to find something -- and find it quick -- for an in-class writing assignment when a half dozen students showed up without their textbooks. Smith's story was all I could think of, so I asked them to write about what they found in it that could help them with their writing as J-students.

Which means I had to go back and re-read the story for writing tips, anecdotes about Murray and other things that might help me as a writer, too. I was surprised how much I found.

For one thing, Murray bombed out in school because he'd get too interested in a project, and he'd let all the rest of the busywork slide. I used to do that, too, and it's one of the reasons I always hated school until I could do research of things that interested me in grad school. But the same habits that hurt Murray (and me) in school are the ones you need as a professional writer.

Jacoby Smith explains:

Murray hungered for in-depth immersion in a subject of his own choosing. What mattered were topics he cared passionately about. He was motivated for a career in writing, for meaningful work that would point him in that direction, but he was not motivated for high school, which did not expedite his cause. When topics of interest captured Murray's attention, days would pass until he surfaced again. He reflects on the situation, "I was a compulsive reader held back by my ... teachers since I read more, far more, than was required. I knew I could learn what I needed to learn." His sense of efficacy, the knowledge that he could do what he determined to do, is characteristic of resilient children.

Whatever Murray decided to do he did with passion. If he failed, he did so abysmally. If he passed, he excelled beyond expectations. His Latin teacher informed him that he was her best translator in class, but in grammar he failed. Today, Murray laughs, "I simply didn't care enough about past participle, intransitive ... verbs."

Wow! That's what I was like all the way through school. I didn't much care for grammar, either. Still don't.

But the way Murray threw himself into research is exactly what pays off in journalism. In a lot of workplace settings, as a matter of fact. Jacoby Smith says Murray is an example of a "resiliant child," a type of student she's trying to reach. I don't know about that, but he was a good enough journalist to get a job with Time right out of school and win a Pulitzer Prize.

The other part I liked has to do with Murray's emphasis on surprise. One reason he was a good writer (a good teacher, too, I think) is because he was always open to being surprised. In fact, he insisted on it. Jacoby Smith says Murray:

... passed most courses, but barely. In his words, "I couldn't make sense of the work if there was no mystery involved."

What is "mystery" for Murray?

Anything that involves surprise. To this day he writes about his craft as putting pen to paper "to write what I do not expect. I invite, encourage, cultivate, welcome, and follow surprise." Though he spent his life as a reporter, writer, and writing coach, he confesses to teaching that which cannot be taught. A writer, he says, hears the voice in his head creating, unraveling, revising, envisioning the writing as it comes. Writing has become an obsession to reveal that which he does not know -- a form of ultimate reality, his daily revelation. He authors faith at the point of a pen and talks about the "voice within, the voice of the text." He claims he can pick out a newsroom's best reporters by watching them silently (prayerfully?) voice the stories as they flow onto the page.

I'm leaving out a couple of footnotes here. You can check them in the original. To me, the main thing here is surprise. It's key to the way I'm trying to teach this whole course in advanced journalistic writing.

In fact, that's what happened when I assigned the Jacoby Smith article in class. I wasn't expecting to, and it was a pleasant surprise. But I guess that's the point.

COMM 337: Your first blogs, a note on grades

2007-08-30T11:09:00.000-05:00

Time to close the books on the assignment I gave you last week, which was to create a blog and post your answers to the question about Donald Murray's last columns to the blog. I think we're off to a halfway decent start, although I do kinda think it might have been a better start if more of you had bothered to do the @#$%! assignment. Some overall observations after reading your responses.

What I like about your blogs.

When I assigned you to read stuff by and about an 82-year-old man, I wasn't sure whether his stuff was going to bridge the generation gap. And I'm never sure how much my students are going to like the same things I do. Sometimes you do, sometimes you don't. It's always a gamble.

This time I thought the gamble paid off.

Something I didn't expect: Most of you commented on Murray's way of life, the way he dealt with personal matters or the way his writing reflected his way of living. His writing tips are good, but I think what he really has to offer is in the attitudes he brings to the craft. And it sounds like you're picking up on that. Good! It's a surprise, but I like surprises (well, most surprises). And I encourage all of you to look for surprises, to delight in surprises as we go along. We'll deal more with surprise as we go along.

Some of your reactions that I liked:

"While reading all of Donald Murray's articles, I got the sense that he thoroughly enjoyed what he was doing," said Christina Ostermeier. "He brought his love of life and writing out in every word he wrote. Although at times I felt a hint of sadness in his writing when mentioning his wife, who passed away before him, I think he still just loved the fact that he got the chance to mention her in his articles."

Christina went on to say that's something in Murray's writing we can all model in our own, writing about the things and the people we know and enjoying it to the hilt. I agree 100 percent.

Other comments that I liked: Ben Harley said:

... What I truly learned from him, and I think I should try to integrate into my own life, I found in his obituary.

"My parents and teachers got together and decided I was stupid," he wrote last year. "My response was to develop a private mantra: 'I'm stupid but I can come in early and stay late.' Surprise. It worked. Good work habits will beat talent every time."

I try to use this idea at work too. This is just a great mantra. Hopefully I have talent, but in case I don't I can still succeed as a writer.

Agreed. Didn't somebody once say success is 1 percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration?

Michele Bearss said there was advice in Murray's columns she could use, but "I would only use it on a personal level." She added:

Within the columns that we were assigned to read it sounded almost like Murray's preparation to leave this world. Almost as if it was his last advice to his readers. Throughout his 82 years of life, Murray wrote a lot of articles and toward the end of his life they were focused mostly on the advice he would want to give to his young readers before he past. In the article titled, "Adventures Close to Home" Murray writes, "Do I stay at home or go out? Each invitation has its own challenge, peculiar to our combination of ailments, discomforts, indignities. The easy way is to stay home watching soap operas as my father did in his last years. But I want to live the life I have been unexpectedly given as fully as possible."

Amen. Good advice for all of us. I like the quote, too, and what he said about life being unexpected. Kind of like surprises.

If you want want to see a model for what a good blog item for class can look like, visit Robert Schwartz' blog. I'll just quote the whole thing:

The one thing I found interesting about Donald Murray's obituary was this quote:

"Each time I sit down to write I don't know if I can do it," he wrote. "The flow of writing is always a surprise and a challenge. Click the computer on and I am 17 again, wanting to write and not knowing if I can."

Even at age 82, he was never sure he'd be able to complete his next assignment. Not because of any physical ailment, but because of the uncertainty that comes with the blank page -- something that all writers share at some point or another, if not all the time. It's interesting to know that even someone of his age and experience would continue to face that problem up to his death.

That blank sheet of paper may turn into a blank computer screen with changing tecnhology, but it never goes away.

What I didn't like.

I would have been happier if more people had done the assignment. This is a writing course, and I don't know any way to learn how to write without doing some writing. If you don't write, you can't learn to write. It's not rocket science, is it?

A word or two about grades.

It would be a violation of federal law for me to post grades to the internet, but I am allowed to make some general observations. One is that you have to do the assignment to get a passing grade. If you don't do an assignment, you get a zero. If you do half the assignment (if you create the assigned blog but don't bother to post anything to it, for example), you get a grade of 50 percent. If you consult our syllabus for COMM 337, you will see the following notice in the section on means of evaluation: "The instructor's grading scale is as follows: A = 100-90. B = 89-80. C = 79-70. D = 69-60. E = 59-0." Do the math.

COMM 337: Wed. in-class exercise

2007-08-29T11:26:00.000-05:00

I developed an instinct for story, the dramatic interaction between people that moved forward with cause and effect. -- Donald Murray

In Chapter 1 of "Writing to Deadline," Don Murray tells how he developed "an instinct for story," something he says every newswriter ought to have. Typically, he tells how he developed the story-telling instinct by telling a story ... the story of how he learned to tell a story. Wow. Kinda post-modern, isn't it? But he also lists several journalistic principles he learned -- things like accuracy, using verbs and nouns, "discovery," writing tight.

Read Washington Post staff writer Teresa Wiltz' Aug. 29 story "Still Singing Those Post-Katrina Blues" and analyze it in terms of Murray's principles. How does she practice the craft? By reading between the lines, what can you tell about the way she reported the story? How does it stack up in terms of accuracy, conciseness, order, clarity, voice and especially "discovery" and "voice?" What do you think Murray means by the terms? You probably won't be able to tell how Wiltz wrote earlier drafts of the story (I can't)! But you can analyze the voice that comes from working with the story and "adapt[ing] to the writing task and the music of the voice" (9). Look at her word choices, the rhythm of the words, the way she picks up a little bit of the New Orleans way of speaking. How can you use some of her techniques in your own writing?

Post your answers as comments to this blogpost.

COMM 337 - links to your blogs / FINAL LIST

2007-08-28T14:35:00.000-05:00

Here's a roster of weblogs in COMM 337 so far, as complete as I can make it. If I don't have your address posted yet, please email it to me. If you want to change yours, correct me, please don't hesitate to let me know. Make a note of the *permalink for this post, because you'll be using it to keep track of class discussion, etc.

Quinn Allen untitled (qa-vs-qsa)
Michele Bearss untitled (writing4weenies)
Jeremy Cook COMM 337 Advance Journalism
Eric Craddock eric
Shalon Davis untitled (shalonspot)
Jeremy Dixon Jeremy D's Blog
Whitney Drobnack untitled (com337mwf1200)
Terah Ellison COM 337 Journal
Jeff Hall Journalism
Ben Harley untitled (vicious_apathy)
Deanna Jones untitled (Ms. Jones)
Zach Kirchner Advanced Journalism 337
Mitch Ladd The Best Blog Names Are Taken
Meghan McCarthy meghanmccarthy
Gina Moscardelli Blogger Gina
Christina Ostermeier untitled (5568blog)
Robert Schwartz Advanced Journalism Writing
Marqueta Stewart queta-marqueta

As the rest of you (the ones with a blank after your names) get your blogs created, please let me know the addresses so we can complete the class roster. This is an ongoing assignment that will not go away. If you haven't gotten around to posting your answer to the first question on the Donald Murray obit and columns in The Boston Globe, that one won't go away either!

_______________________
* A permalink is a permanent link for a blog post. Explains the techterms.com website, they allow us to bookmark a blog post so we can come back to it later, even after "the posting is outdated and no longer present on the home page."

COMM 337: Quotes, color in New Orleans story / READ!

2007-08-26T08:15:00.000-05:00

Cross-posted from my HUM 223 blog ...

A by-lined story in The Washington Post this morning. Very complex. Very well written. Notice the way staff reporter Teresa Wiltz starts with a soft lede ... a word picture of jazzman John Boutte singing and counting money that leads her into the main point of the story, a nut graf that very simply says, "Nearly 4,000 New Orleans musicians were sent scattering after Hurricane Katrina hit on Aug. 29, 2005. Many of them have been trying to return ever since. Today the soul of the city -- its rich musical legacy-- is at risk."

Notice especially how she blends description -- which journalists like to call "color" -- and quotes with background. As you read it, can you imagine her sitting in cars taking notes, going to a night club in the 9th Ward, soaking up color and getting people's words down? As you read it, look for the way she reported the story, in other words.

Will the New Orleans music scene ever get back to what it was before Hurricane Katrina hit in 2005? Probably not, says an article in this morning's Washington Post. Read it (and read it now because The Post doesn't archive stories on its website forever). The spirit of the music will live on, but an awful lot has been lost. This story suggests how much.

Here's the the main point of the story, by staff writer Teresa Wiltz:

Nearly 4,000 New Orleans musicians were sent scattering after Hurricane Katrina hit on Aug. 29, 2005. Many of them have been trying to return ever since. Today the soul of the city -- its rich musical legacy-- is at risk.

"Everything is shrinking," says David Freedman, general manager of WWOZ-FM, a public radio station in the city. "In the clubs, you get the impression that all's back to normal. When you start scratching the surface, it's smoke and mirrors.

"So many musicians have not come back. How many can we lose before we lose that dynamic? To what degree do we just become a tourist theme park?"

By industry insiders' estimates, a third of the city's musicians [...] have found a way back home for good. Another third, like Lumar LeBlanc of the brass band Soul Rebels, are doing what he calls "the double Zip code thing," parachuting into town for gigs and then heading back to temporary homes in Houston, Atlanta, Los Angeles. The final third, like blind bluesman Henry Butler, stuck in Denver, have yet to make it back.

Among the double Zip-coders is Ivan Neville, singer, songwriter, keyboardist, son of Aaron. His mom's house was washed away. She passed in January. His dad settled near Nashville. Neville relocated to Austin, jetting in and out of New Orleans a couple times a month. As for making a permanent move back home?

"I don't see it," Neville, 48, says between sets at the Maple Leaf in the city's Uptown section. "Not in the near future. The spirit of New Orleans is alive. But it will never be the same again."

Wiltz notes that high schools lost their musical instruments, and 40 percent of their students. "With the loss of schools comes the loss of teaching jobs, work that musicians counted on to pay the rent between gigs," she adds. "With the loss of students comes the loss of a future generation of musicians."

I'm cross-posting this story to my advanced journalism blog, too, because it's so well written. See how Wiltz conveys the spirit of a little club in the 9th Ward, the part of the city hit hardest by the 2005 flooding:

But the hardest thing to preserve is something that can't be purchased. It is that which New Orleanians so desperately want to preserve: the feel of the city, that NOLA mojo, the likes of which can be found in Bullets, a crowded little Mid-City joint. Inside, trumpeter Kermit Ruffins and his band, the Barbecue Swingers, are jammed against the window. A steady stream of sports is playing on the TV, but no one pays much attention.

In spirit, Bullets is as far from the tourist-laden French Quarter as you can get. Here, it's buckets of Miller Lite and chicken wings served alongside Ruffins's gritty, greasy swinging "trad jazz" -- traditional jazz. The crowd is more boomer than youthful, with seasoned souls sporting tees that read "We Survived Hurricane Katrina" and "New Orleans: Proud to Call It Home." A grizzled gent leans over a newcomer, slyly uttering the post-Katrina pickup line du jour: "I really want to show you the Ninth Ward."

As the sun sets, a man comes in peddling homemade tamales; another hawks cellphone covers and disposable cameras. Tattooed white kids arrive, while a contingent of Creole matrons stands in the center of the room, arms folded, looking just a little bit aloof. Until they start to dance as one, getting down and dirty with the beat.

A man scratches away on a washboard as band members sing in Creole and English, catcalling and ululating. Everybody, it seems, knows the words, and they sing along, loud and strong, filling the tiny club with a sense of goose-bump-raising communion.

I cry Hey mama

In the morning time

Yi-Yi-Yi

"Only in New Orleans," Ruffins chants, laughing and laughing. "Only in New Orleans."

Wiltz doesn't explain how she happened to hear the "pickup line du jour." Maybe she doesn't have to.

When it comes to American music, New Orleans is the cradle. It's the Garden of Eden. It's where it all began. Wiltz' story conveys that, and in a few words -- a well chosen quote -- she conveys how much was lost in Hurrican Katrina.

This is the city that spawned Jelly Roll Morton and Louis Armstrong, Mahalia Jackson and Sidney Bechet, Randy Newman and Master P -- not to mention a long line of famous musical families: the Marsalises, the Nevilles, the Batistes, the Toussaints.

Folks like to brag that New Orleans is the northernmost tip of the Caribbean, a sentiment that has little to do with geography. It's a sensibility, evident in the food, the culture, in the French and Spanish surnames, in the old folks who cling to Creole, an Africanized French patois.

New Orleanians have always celebrated the mixing of genes, the blending of races and cultures into a potent ancestral gumbo. All this informs the music here, marinating it in nostalgia and a sense of defiant joy. New Orleanians are peculiarly tied to place, ever cognizant of history.

Drive by Congo Square, and without fail, a local will remind you that it was here that the slaves played their music on Sundays, drumming away their worries, and where a slave could earn enough extra money to buy freedom. Where the Creole orchestras played in brass band concerts -- many of whose members were the black sons of rich white fathers who sent them to Europe to be educated.

"In New York, you learn jazz, you learn the blues," Paul Sanchez says. "In New Orleans, you're born into it. Baby comes out the womb chasing the rhythm."

He's waxing lyrical as he tools around the Lower Ninth Ward, cruising in his green minivan.

"I tell you, this place is magic," Sanchez says. "I say this with sadness in my voice."

In another interview, with more well chosen quotes from a 21-year-old "jazz-funk-rock-pop" musician named Troy "Trombone Shorty" Andrews, she conveys what remains, how fragile it is and how important it is for the future. As you almost have to do in New Orleans these days, she approaches the future through the past:

When Katrina hit, Andrews was a 19-year-old wunderkind on break from touring with Lenny Kravitz. He fled with his family to Dallas, 10 crammed in his Volvo, wondering and worrying if other family members made it out, too.

He didn't stay away for long. New Orleans grounds him. Specifically, it is Faubourg Treme that feeds him -- reputed to be America's oldest black neighborhood, which nurtured the musical talents of the Rebirth Brass Band, 19th-century Creole classical composer Edmund Dede, Kermit Ruffins and Louis Prima. The neighborhood that nurtured Andrews.

Here, high-water marks along the wooden shotgun houses and shuttered nightclubs give mute testimony to the flood. Few residents returned, but today, under a highway overpass, against a backdrop of murals of long-gone jazz greats, a group of men gathers as it does every day, sitting on metal folding chairs, trying to reclaim a little bit of community. Most of them don't live here any longer.

"These," Andrews says, pointing at the men as he pulls up alongside them in his oversize SUV, "are the last that's left. This is the soul of the neighborhood."

He rolls down the window. "Hey, Dad. Do you need anything? You hungry?" His father, James, smiles at him, shakes his head.

This is where Trombone Shorty comes to touch base, to get his "laugh on," to run errands for his elders. To remind himself not to get a big head. To remind himself of the importance of reaching back, to pull along other musicians who aren't as fortunate as he.

"New Orleans made me who I am," Andrews says. "I can't leave it.

"I need New Orleans. And New Orleans needs me."

COMM 337: Ground rules/Fri. assignment

2007-08-22T11:41:00.000-05:00

On Friday we will cover a talk by two Catholic priests who have experience in Iraq. As it now stands, it will be in the Presidents Room (L15) at noon and it will replace the Friday writing assignment I mentioned previously. Any updates I will post to this blog.

We have been asked to abide by certain ground rules regarding identification of the speakers or the agency sponsoring the talk: (1) we don't identify the speakers by name in what we write; and (2) we don't identify the sponsoring agency in anything we write. No pictures and no sound recordings, either. You wouldn't think about this at first, but both can be used to identify people. So we don't use either.

Normally journalists are very reluctant to quote anonymous sources. But where there's good reason, it is not an uncommon practice. Given what is happening in Iraq, failure to abide by ground rules could literally get somebody killed. So we will be attending the talk "on background" and following Associated Press ground rules on the use of anonymous sources.

COM 337: Read and post to blog

2007-08-22T10:56:00.000-05:00

Do this assignment after you open your blog and post the address to the COMM 337: Class blog addresses" comments field. Due Friday so I can read them and evaluate them over the weekend.

Donald Murray, author of our textbook "Writing to Deadline" and columnist for The Boston Globe," died at the end of last year. He was 82.

Here's what I want you to do:

1. Read Murray's obituary in The Globe and the last few columns he wrote, which are still available on the newspaper's website. (Talk about a guy who kept going right up to the end. He turned in his last column on a Friday, he died Saturday and the column appeared in Tuesday's paper.) Pay special attention to his last column, headlined "Friends' caring, sharing shows the way," and the column headed "Finding pleasure in the challenge of a blank sheet" that ran Dec. 26.

2. Write an answer to the following question(s) and post to your blog. (Especially if you're not used to blogging yet, I would recommend drafting your answers in Microsoft Word and copy-and-pasting them to the blog. If you post links, see this important *warning at the bottom of the page. If you're not posting links yet, it'll just confuse you. That's why I'm putting it at the bottom like an old-fashioned footnote.) Here's the question:

Donald Murray was 82 years old when he did. Is there anything in his last few columns that you can learn from in your own career as a professional writer?

No right answers here, although I do want you to think about these columns and see if there's anything in them you can use in your own writing. You all have different goals, and different ways of writing, so you'll get different things out of the columns and/or the obituary ... something he says about writing and the craft of writing, the way he handled his career, the way he writes, his style, word choices, etc., whatever. It's up to you, but I think he'll have something to say to all of us as writers.

An example: If I were doing this exercise, I might post a blog on the way he kept churning out columns in old age when life was obviously getting difficult for him and he had a good excuse to just sit back and not put in the effort, but clearly it was important to him to keep meeting deadlines. His daughter said something about how he lived through his writing. But I also like what he said about people might think he's stupid (although I seriously doubt anybody really did), but he could work harder. And it blows me away his last column was thanking his friends for being there for him. Did he know it was going to be his last?

No wrong answers, either. Although "die young and leave a good-looking corpse" might come close to being one.

* Warning footnote on hypertext links. Here's something I found out the hard way: If you type out hypertext -- that stuff that goes "a href equal-sign quote" you used to link to your blogs -- in Microsoft Word, Bill @#$&ing Gates will put "curly quotes" in automatically, and Blogger won't know what to do with them. I just put x's in the draft and type in the hypertext later in Blogger.

COM 337: Class blog addresses

2007-08-21T15:20:00.000-05:00

As soon as you've opened your blog, you need to let the rest of us know your address. So I've set up a handy-dandy place you can do that. It's this post. Here are the steps:

1. Go down to the end of this post where it says "posted by Pete # 3:20 PM 0 comments" (except the number of comments will change as you follow the rest of the instructions), and click on where it says "___ comments." That will open up the comment field.

2. In the comment field, write a message telling us what you're naming your blog and creating a link to it (which is why the number of comments will change, but you've figured that out already so I don't need to tell you, right)?

Here's how you do a link. You'll have to use the angle brackets, the keys that look like "less than" and "greater than" from math class that you'll find as the shift of the comma and the period on your keyboard. Stuff that's enclosed in angle brackets is called an HTML "tag." (And HTML is short for Hypertext Markup Language. But I'll bet you already knew that, too.)

3. Start your link by entering <a href=" Then copy your blog's address (or URL) from the "Address" field on your browser and paste it in right after the quote mark. Follow it with another "> so it looks something like this <a href="yourblog.blogspot.com"> all run together with no spaces.

4. Next you need some text that you highlight so it'll take readers to your blog when they click on it. That's called hypertext. If you're doing this for the first time, it's easiest to say something like: Click here for the link. And highlight the word "here." It'll look like this: Click <a href="yourblog.blogspot.com">here</a> for link.

5. Make sure you put your address in the message. Just type it in normally without any of the angle brackets.

You may get all of this right the first time. You may not. (Don't feel bad if you don't! Just keep trying.) Pretty quickly, you'll get used to it. And it's an important thing to know because you'll be doing a lot of linking on your blogs as you get under way.

Once you've made the link, save the comment to this blogpost and make a note of the headline, the date, the permalink address of this post or whatever. We'll be coming back to it.

So the next time you're sitting at a bar and you notice somebody next to you staring into their beer and muttering "angle bracket a space href equals quote URL quote angle bracket," you'll understand why. Buy 'em a round. They may need it.

COMM 337 assignment: Starting your blogs

2007-08-19T12:35:00.000-05:00

You'll notice on your syllabus for Communications 337 I'm requiring you to create a blog and do a lot of your work in the form of posts to that blog. I think you will enjoy this part of the class once you get used to it.

A couple of places to look to begin with:

1. There's a good brief (500 words) definition of blogging by Jill Walker Rettberg, an associate professor at the University of Bergen in Norway. She's writing a book on blogging and also has an academic research blog on blogging called jill/txt. Some of her discussion is way over my head, but she's one of the best people I've read on the theory behind the phenomenon.

2. To see what a major metro newspaper does with blogs, go to The Chicago Tribune's homepage and look for the "Latest from our blogs" box. Today's is in the middle of the page, a little to the left and directly below the chicagotribune.com nameplate. It'll probably be in more or less the same place tomorrow (Monday) when you see it. Read several of the blogs, and they'll give you a good idea of some of the possibilities.

We'll look at several other blogs in class, and you'll link to several in one of your first posts. So start looking for blogs that you can model yours after. See what interests you and what doesn't. One thing you can do is express your personality (although maybe not in the same way(s) as MySpace) in a blog. So look around and see what appeals to you and what techniques you can use in your own blog.

By the end of the week, you should be ready to start your blog. I suggest Blogger. It's relentlessly user-friendly. But you may have another host that you like better. If so,

One warning, though: Blogging is a form of publication. One of my old bosses, an elected state official, used to say: "Never put anything in writing you wouldn't want to see leaked to The [Chicago] Trib or The Sun-Times." Good advice! Never put anything on your blog you wouldn't want to see printed out and clipped to your resume before a job interview. But you can -- and should -- express yourself more informally in a blog than you do in a college paper. In evaluating your blogs, I'll be guided by the applicable standards in the Writing Assessment Rubric linked to my faculty page.

Grammar rules!

2007-08-19T10:40:00.000-05:00

Ever think typos aren't important? Oh, people will know what I meant even if I didn't dot all the I's and cross all the T's? Well, take a look at the mess the Arkansas state legislature has to clean up. It all began when an extra "not" crept into a law on the age of consent. Here's the story, as reported by Andrew DeMillo of The Associated Press:

LITTLE ROCK, Ark. — A law passed this year allows Arkansans of any age — even infants — to marry if their parents agree, and the governor may call a special session to fix the mistake, lawmakers said Friday.

The legislation was intended to establish 18 as the minimum age to marry but also allow pregnant teenagers who are younger to marry with parental consent, bill sponsor Rep. Will Bond said. An extraneous "not" in the bill, however, allows anyone who is not pregnant to marry at any age if parents allow it.

So Arkansas got worldwide headlines when DeMillo's story was picked by AP members who couldn't resist it. The Seattle Times' was typical: "Law lets even babies marry with parents' OK."

AP's original headline was probably something like this: "Mistake in Ark. law allows toddlers to marry with parental OK." Several papers and TV stations, starting with The Commercial in Pine Bluff, Ark., used that headline Friday. And The Boston Globe, ABC News and The Guardian in London, England, had, "Mistaken Ark. law would let toddlers wed."

Other headlines: "State allows babies to marry ... with parental consent" -- USA Today. "Arkansas accidentally cuts legal age to wed to nearly zero" -- The Statesman-American in Austin, Tex. "Arkansas law lets toddlers tie the knot!" in The Times of India. I don't know if that's pun on the extra "not" or not. But how about this in The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette? "Deletion of ‘not’ in marriage-age law knotted up."

Not the image you want to project of your state, or your legislature! (And that "not" belongs where it is.)

Here's how it happened. With the extra word, the law reads like this: "In order for a person who is younger than eighteen (18) years of age and who is not pregnant to obtain a marriage license, the person must provide the county clerk with evidence of parental consent to the marriage."

Well, think about it. Babies are under 18, and they're rarely pregnant. So all they need is parental consent. Right? So a code-revision commission -- which fixes typographical and technical errors in laws -- tried to correct the mistake, but The Arkansas Legislative Council ruled Friday the commission went beyond its powers.

"You're either pregnant or you're not pregnant," said Sen. Dave Bisbee, a Republican. "Rarely will that be a typographical error."

Bisbee is a quotable guy, by the way. Here's what he told The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette before the legislative council met Friday:

“Did your mother explain to you the difference between being pregnant and not being pregnant ? It’s not technical,” he said in an interview.

Arkansas lawmakers are worried about having the state become a pedophile magnet (which seems unlikely to me but not something I'd want on my resume if I were a co-sponsor of the age-of-consent bill). Me, I'm worried about all the poor slobs who were supposed to be proofreading bills before the House and Senate passed them and the governor signed them. How did they let this one slip by? Are their next jobs going to be with Wendy's or Burger King?

HUM 221 223 -- culture and cuisine

2007-05-27T16:14:00.000-05:00

Here's something to think about as we consider the cultural values that influence artistic expressions as different as blues, jazz, hip hop, powwow dancing, Native American poetry and storytelling. Culture also determines what we like to eat, as BBC News correspondent Richard Black notes in this account of why the Japanese consider whale a delicacy. Black reports:

... I was in a waterfront cafe in Shimonoseki, a long-time whaling port.

In front of me was whale meat, from an animal which it is simply unthinkable to eat in Britain - so unthinkable that I had to promise my daughters I would not touch a morsel of it during my time in Japan.

Yet once in Japan, nothing seemed more normal.

This leads him into some fascinating interviews, with a retired Japanese whaler, with an Australian who hunts kangaroos for sport ... well, read it, I can't do it justice in a summary.

Which in turn leads Black into some heavy-duty philosophizing about what we eat -- and don't eat -- and why:

Back in Tokyo, I sat one evening in a sushi restaurant dining with a young, modern urban Japanese lady who was tucking into some raw whale.

I asked whether she would ever eat dog. She looked shocked. No, no, she told me, it would be unthinkable - but her whale was delicious.

A few years before, in Vietnam, I had seen restaurants with cooked dogs hanging up outside, much as Chinese restaurants in Western cities display cooked ducks and slabs of roast pork.

So would Vietnamese people ever eat whale? Apparently not, I am told - it would be unthinkable.

So why the contradiction? Why is it OK to eat horses in France and Italy but not in Britain? Why do Finns proudly serve reindeer, and Icelanders puffin, while others recoil at the thought of eating them?

Does every society concoct its own list of what is acceptable and what is not?

Does every individual do the same? Is it just culture? And if it is, is there any hope of securing agreement between different camps on issues like whaling? Is it even right to try?

What do you think? Ever eaten grasshopper? Rattlesnake? Frog's legs? Ever think about what goes into a hot dog? How does our culture determine what we eat -- and don't eat -- and what we listen to and don't listen to?

Disclosure. I probably shouldn't admit this in public, but I've eaten whale. In Norway, which like Japan is a whaling nation. It tasted a lot like beef. (Which came as a surprise, but shouldn't have. Whales are mammals.) I've had reindeer sausage, too, in Alaska. Not bad. It tasted about like summer sausage.

HUM 221, 223: Fr. Michael Oleksa on culture

2007-05-18T13:49:00.000-05:00

Fr. Michael Oleksa, Alaska educator and Russian Orthodox priest, has a talk on cross-cultural communication on Alaska LitSite. It's an edited transcript of a speech he gave at a conference on The Future of Alaska sponsored by the Alaska Humanities Forum and the First Alaskans Foundation.

I need to link it to my syllabuses for the interdisciplinary humanities courses.

Some highlights:

A definition of culture. What’s your culture? It’s a hard thing to define, isn’t it? Look it up in the dictionary -- Webster is of absolutely no help. They’ll start with bacteria for one thing … But when we ask, “What is your culture?” how do you define that? How do you conceptualize it? Talking about your own culture is one of the most difficult things to do, because your culture is the air you breathe. It’s the aquarium into which you were born, and it’s very hard to imagine what life would have been like if you had been born in a lake or in the ocean. Your aquarium is your world. That’s one way of thinking of culture, but that’s limiting.

I’d like to think of culture as the way you understand the game of life. All games have certain rules and regulations that govern them, basic skills that have to be learned in order to win. If you were born into the culture that organizes conferences like this, you were born into a culture that takes time very seriously. It measures time. You have proverbs like “time is money,” and “don’t waste time.” You talk about time as if it were a quantity or a location. Time is something you can be on or ahead of or behind, and that’s why you have to kill a lot of time before it gets you.

If you were born in rural Alaska, however, you don’t necessarily have that sense of time at all. It’s a different ball game, and that’s the first point I want to make. If your culture is the game of life as you play it, because it’s the only aquarium you’ve ever been in, we often assume that our ball game is the only ball game there is -- that everyone plays life the same way, according to the same rules, with the same presuppositions and with the same goals. Then, when you go to another culture, you’re suddenly up against another ball game and you realize not everybody’s playing on the same field with the same equipment, using the same skills to score the same points.

A sense of place, culture and story ... For a newcomer to Alaska flying over our gorgeous wilderness territory, one mountain’s the same as another. They’re all pretty, but none of them strike the viewer, the tourist, as more significant than another one. But ask the Native population who lives in that ecosystem about that terrain, and some places have greater significance than others. There are stories behind those mountains. There are stories on that lake, on the lake shore.

A few months ago at a conference out on the Alaska Peninsula, I tried to get some guys to talk about their village and why it was important to them. I asked them, “Tell me a story about a place near the village.”

One of the men in the group said, “I’ve got one. When I was a boy, I went out on my first moose hunt with my uncle and he took me to a particular place down the river and such. We got to a certain location and we looked further down, and on the hill beyond us a moose emerged from the brush. My uncle said, 'It’s yours, this is your moose hunt, this is your moose.' So I raised my rifle and I shot the moose. It went right down and my uncle was so proud of me. He congratulated me on my first successful moose hunt, and we started moving our boat closer, but the moose stood up again. My uncle slowed the boat down. He said, 'You better shoot again.' So I shot a second time, but we couldn’t believe that moose was that strong to survive the first shot. We got to the hill itself, and as we were climbing the hill, that moose stood up a third time. My uncle said, 'Well, better do it again.' The third time, the moose went down and stayed down. When we got to the top of that hill, boy, were we surprised -- three moose!' No one’s ever written that story down. He said, “Every time I go past that bend in the river, every time I look at that hill, I think Three Moose Hill.”

Language, culture and schools Public schools were founded over a century ago to assimilate the immigrants who were pouring into the United States, passing the Statue of Liberty, being processed in a day or two at Ellis Island, and flooding the east coast of our country. These immigrants spoke, but probably didn’t read or write, their native languages. Almost none of them spoke English. They were of diverse languages and cultures and religions, and had very little formal education and few job skills. Public schools took them at the turn of the last century and helped their children become Americans who could function as productive citizens in society.

That was the focus of public education at the turn of the last century. If we could do that then, what we need to do now is focus on helping us bridge the gaps, respecting and delighting in each other, understanding that we all have something to learn from other people precisely because they don’t play the game of life the same way we do. They don’t see reality the same way we do. We don’t want to stamp that out of them. We want to be enriched by it. It’s a very different approach -- from the melting pot to the salad bowl.

Melting pot vs. 'salad bowl' The melting pot, by Supreme Court decision, had to be abandoned. The melting pot declared one particular culture to be the national norm -- it was White, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant male. If you could be that or pretend that you had actually come on the Mayflower instead of recently through Ellis Island, you were in. If you couldn’t, you were out.

Finally, by the 1970s, our country reached the stage where it quit trying to put the whole salad into a blender and push the liquefy button. We recognized that we need to take delight in the fact that, in our salad bowl, the onions are onions, and the green peppers are green peppers, and the cheddar cheese is cheddar cheese, and the Romaine lettuce is the lettuce, and the tomatoes are the tomatoes -- and they all have to be themselves, because they all add flavor and color and texture and make it a better salad. But then what holds it together?

HTLM exercise D R A F T

2007-04-08T20:43:00.000-05:00

Are you Web savvy? Or for all you know, do you think HTML might be a short-order cook's abbreviation for a ham sandwich with letuce and tomato? Here's an exercise designed to give you a taste of HTML. (OK, OK, you read the assigned chapter, and you already know HTML stands for hypertext markup language. Right?) Anyway, today we'll give you a taste of HTML on The Mackerelwrapper blog, taking advantage of a feature of Blogger that lets you use simple HTML tags in the comments field.

HTML tags come in pairs. There are a few exceptions to this rule, but 99 percent of the time you have to use them in pairs. The first consists of angle brackets -- the "less than" (<) and "greater than" (>) signs you remember from math class -- around a code. And the second consists of a "less than" angle bracket and a slash -- which looks like </ -- and a "more than" angle bracket around the same code. It tells the computer to stop doing whatever the first tag told it to do. For example, the first sentence of this paragaph would look like this in HTML: <b>HTML tags come in pairs.</b> The first tag tells the computer to start setting in boldface type, and the second tag tells it to stop.

OK, let's get started. What I want you to do is to choose something to write a brief paragraph about, and post it as a comment to this blog post. Something you won't be embarrassed to publish to the World Wide Web. Cats, dogs, ferrets, the Cubs, the Cardinals, quadratic equations, dumb in-class assignments, whatever. For demonstration purposes, I'll choose butterflies.

1. Start by writing a headline. To make the type big, enclose your headline in these tags: <h1> at the beginning and </h1> at the end. In HTML it will look something like this: <h1>Flutter by, butterfly.</h1>

2. Next, write something about your subject. It doesn't matter what. But here's what does matter: I want you to find a website that explains something about your subject, and create a hypertext link to that website. Here's how it might work: As I surf the Web looking for stuff on butterflies, I come across the legend of the Chinese philosopher Chuang Chou (or Zhuangzi), who once dreamed he was a butterfly. But, according to the legend, when he woke up "he didn't know if he was Chuang Chou who had dreamt he was a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming he was Chuang Chou." Great story, huh? Really gets you thinking. I found it in the online encyclopedia Wikipedia, so I'll create a hypertext link to it.

The HTML tag for a hypertext link starts with <a href=" and the address or URL (which stands for Uniform Resource Locater, right?) followed by "> ... so I highlight the Wikipedia page's address and copy it, then paste it into the tags so it looks like this: <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zhuangzi"> ... then I'll write a few words that I want in the link and I close it with </agt; (see how it picks up the "a" from the opening tag)? Here's what my text might look like: The ancient Chinese philosopher Chuang Chou <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zhuangzi">once dreamed he was a butterfly.</agt; When he woke up ...

Flutter by, butterfly

Butterflies don't make butter, but they do fly. And sometimes they make philosophy. The ancient Chinese philosopher Chuang Chou once dreamed he was a butterfly. When he woke up ...

See how the words "once dreamed he was a butterfly" are converted by the HTML tag into hypertext? There are quite a few other tags to learn in HTML (although most of us get started by pasting them in from a list of tags we find through a Google search). But this <a href=" hypertext tag is the basic building block of the World Wide Web.

Now it's your turn. Think of something to write about. Find a Web page about it. And post a hypertext link to it. You may post as a comment to this blog post.

Why don't you start by writing a headline.

Jan Morris: pendulum swing on U.S. "swagger"?

2007-02-13T18:38:00.000-06:00

Jan Morris, British travel writer and author of a provocative book on Lincoln, has a piece in today's Guardian with any number of provocative insights on the "idea of America" -- and an evident love of Broadway show tunes.

For myself, I responded to them all too sentimentally. Like Walt Whitman before me, I heard America sing! I relished the hackneyed old lyrics - Mine eyes have seen the glory, Thy word our law, Thy paths our chosen way, Oe'r the land of the free and the home of the brave, God bless America, land that I love ... Most of the words were flaccid, many of the tunes were vulgar, but as I heard them I saw always in my mind's eye, as Whitman did, all the glorious space, grandeur and opportunity that was America, Manhattan to LA. Sea, in fact, to shining sea.

In those days we did not think of American evangelists as prophets of political extremism - they seemed more akin to the homely convictions of plantation or village chapel than to the machinations of neocons. We bridled rather at the American assumption that the US of A had been the only true victor of the second world war, but most of us did not very deeply resent the happy swagger of the legend and danced gratefully enough to the American rhythms of the time. We thought it all seemed essentially innocent.

Innocent! Dear God! Half a century, and nobody thinks that now. Far from being the most beloved country on earth, today the US is the most thoroughly detested. ...

A lot of it is standard (although I don't think Morris mentions President Bush by name), what what's evident is Morris' essential affection for Americans of 50 years ago:

A generation or two ago, most of us, wherever we lived, loved the generous self-satisfaction of it, if not in the general, at least in the particular. The GI was not then a sort of goggled monster in padded armour, but a cheerful fellow chatting up the girls and distributing candy not as a matter of policy, but out of plain goodwill - everyone's friendly guy next door. To millions of radio listeners around the world, the Voice of America was a voice of decency, and one could watch the lachrymose patriotic rituals of America - the hand on heart, the misty-eyed salute to the flag - with more affection than irony.

Morris says he hopes a new president, an artist no less, will come out of the 2008 elections, and restore what used to be:

All it needs is someone with a key to unlock that Idea again, and I hope it will be that next president, whoever it is, even now gearing up for the election. Please God, may it be a poetic president. Inspiration has been the true engine of American success, and all its greatest presidents have been people with a divine spark. The dullards may have been efficient, respected or influential, but the Jeffersons and the Roosevelts, the Lincolns and the Kennedys have all been, in their different ways, artists.

So may it be a president with the key of original inspiration who can release the Idea from its occlusion. All the ingredients are still there, after all - the kindness, the imagination, the merriment, the will, the talent, the energy, the goddam orneriness, the plain goodness - all there waiting to burst out once more and bring us back our America, blessed and blessing too.

"Give our regards to old Broadway", sang Cohan, "And say that I'll be there ere long." So will we, so will we, just as soon as America comes home.

Good high-school journalism course

2007-02-11T20:41:00.000-06:00

An excellent-looking distance learning high school journalism course from Oregon, part of the COOLSchool website ... accredited by the Northwest Association of Accredited Schools.

A table of contents, with comments from Sue and Dean Barr, of Eugene, who copyrighted the curriculum:

Lesson 1. An Introduction. You'll be introduced to journalism through this first lesson when you write up a get-to-know-you profile as you learn the first rules of journalistic style.

Lesson 2. History of Journalism. Where we've been is important to knowing where we are going. The same is true for journalism. Journalism history will show us why we live with some of the protocols and constraints that we have today.

Lesson 3. Functions of Mass Media. In this unit you'll learn the qualities of a successful journalist and the functions of mass media in our society and its influence on our lives.

Lesson 4. Newswriting Qualities & Elements. It is important to be able to understand how a news article differs from other forms of writing, and how to distinguish between fact and opinion.

Lesson 5. Journalistic Style. If a news article is to be professional and consistent in its approach to titles, capitalization and abbreviations, it is extremely important that journalists learn and apply the rules of journalistic style.

Lesson 6. Interviewing & Gathering Information. You cannot write a complete article unless you know how to interview news sources and gather information from written sources and from the Internet.

Lesson 7. "Lead" Writing. Perhaps the most important part of the news story is the opening, called the "lead," which tells the reader what has happened. You must be able to evaluate information, select what needs to be included, and write a clear, concise lead.

Lesson 8. Newswriting. It is time to get to the real purpose of this course: to learn to write complete news articles. You'll be writing a number of different stories that will help you become a proficient journalist.

Link here to Iraqi blogs

2007-01-14T16:13:00.000-06:00

Today's San Francisco Chronicle has an interesting overview of blogs being written from Iraq -- or, in the case of refugees -- about Iraq by Iraqis. The headline tells the story:

BAGHDAD BLOGGING
Bloggers in the war zone write both about the devastating effects of the conflict and about the events, relationships and frustrations that occur in their everyday lives

At the bottom of the story are links to Riverbend and other blogs. Riverbend is the best known in the West, perhaps, but they're all complelling because they give us a viewpoint -- a variety of viewpoints, really -- we don't get from our media in the U.S.

Chief Illiniwek 'honored' with racist webpage

2007-01-13T19:15:00.000-06:00

American Indians have now been "honored" with a racist webpage. It was on Facebook, and it was called "If They Get Rid of the Chief I'm Becoming a Racist." It contained comments by University of Illinois students -- or people who said they were students -- about the controversy over the U of I's Chief Illiniwek.
And it demonstrated pretty conclusively the kind of trouble that racist sports mascots can lead to.

By far the most detailed and balanced report is in Inside Higher Ed, an online newsletter that covers colleges and universities. The headline, "Ugly Turn in Mascot Dispute," says it all. And the story links to a screen grab from the Facebook site. It was taken down last week after Native American faculty noticed it and grew alarmed because it threatened violence.

According to a Jan. 10 story in the Champaign News-Gazette, the offending comments were posted a month or two ago:

Late in November, according to the UI Native American House and opponents of Chief Illiniwek, one UI student reportedly wrote, "there was never a racist problem before ... but now i hate redskins and hope all those drunk, casino owning bums die." (The punctuation and spelling are as reported by the Native American House.)

About two weeks later, another UI student posted, "that's the worst part! apparently the leader of this (anti-chief) movement is of Sioux descent. Which means what, you ask? the Sioux indians are the ones that killed off the Illini indians, so she's just trying to finish what her ancestors started. I say we throw a tomohawk into her face."

It's hard to tell. Were the kids who posted this stuff being playful? Sounds like maybe they were. But when people threaten violence, you can't be too careful.

It's like a bomb scare. Even if you hear children giggling in the background when they phone the damn thing in, you don't take any chances. You evacuate the building.

So on Jan. 10, the U of I felt there'd been a little too much "honoring." The News-Gazette has the fullest account of the university''s reaction:

In an e-mail to students, faculty and staff Tuesday afternoon, UI Chancellor Richard Herman said he would not tolerate violent threats, and the university "will take all legal and disciplinary actions available in response to the threatening messages."
Herman declined to say if the university has forwarded the threats to any law enforcement agencies.

The chancellor learned of the postings earlier this week and became appalled after reading them, he said. He called the messages racist.
"From my point of view, it (the Web page) clearly promotes divisiveness and singles out people," he said, adding, "I need to make clear this sort of behavior, whether legal or illegal, is unwelcome."

In his e-mail to the UI community, Herman wrote the idea that the debate over Chief Illiniwek "could degenerate to personal attacks that threaten the physical safety and well-being of members of the campus community is something that all of us should find truly abhorrent."

Inside Higher Ed has a few more details, including the fact the website targeted (although not by name) a specific student of Lakota (Sioux) ancestery.

Stephen Kaufman, emeritus biology professor, spoke to Inside Higher Ed of "an atmosphere of intimidation on this campus.” He was concerned for the Lakota student, of course, but he knows something about intimidation himself. Inside Higher Ed reported:

Kaufman became the target of campus protest last fall when a student started an online petition rallying students to get him to resign for sending letters to high school athletes that the university was seeking to recruit.
The petition against Kaufman received over 3,300 signatures.

No doubt they were "honoring" Kaufman.

Since I teach a Native American cultural studies course at a nearby college, I hear a lot about Chief Illiniwek from my students. And I believe them when they say they really don't think anyone intends for the mascot to be racist, and they truly can't understand why others think it is.

Me, I think it's kind of like beauty. Remember the old sayings? Racism is in the eye of the beholder. And here's another that fits even better. Racism is as racism does.

More stuff for COMM 317 syllabus

2007-01-04T13:17:00.000-06:00

How to study court cases in class? Here are links to a couple of very helpful webpages by Princeton Review, the test prep company (not affiliated with Princeton University). One is on how to study a casebook and the other is on the Socratic method, which we will use in class -- at least some of the time. The University of Chicago Law School also has several pages and links on Socratic method. Read them and be ready to join in a Socratic discussion in class.

COMM 317 -- common law and Lord Coke

2007-01-03T21:34:00.000-06:00

Some more links for the COMM 317 syllabus"

'Stork didn't bring our rights.' Read the essay on "Legal Foundations of Press Freedom in the United States" by Jane E. Kirtley, media ethics professor at the School of Journalism and Mass Communication, University of Minnesota, explains how judges going all the way back to Merrie Olde England brought us our rights. Also read about Sir Edward Coke, legal scholar and judge of the English courts of Common Pleas and King's Bench in the 1600s. Lord Coke is one of the guys who most influenced our system of law, our way of thinking about legal issues and therefore the rights we enjoy as American citizens.

Wisdom from Lord Coke. Several passages from a collection of quotes by The ... Institutes of the Lawes of England Sir Edward Coke (1552-1634), Chief Justice of the King's Bench under King James I:

There be three kinds of unhappie men. 1. Qui scit & non docet, Hee that hath knowledge and teacheth not. 2. Qui docet & non vivit, He that teacheth, and liveth not thereafter. 3. Qui nescit, & non interrogat, He that knoweth not, and doth not enquire to understand. Sect. 232b.

The reason of the law is the life of the law; for though a man can tell the law, yet if he know not the reason thereof, he shall soone forget his superficial knowledge. But when he findeth the right reason of the law, and so bringeth it to his natural reason, that he comprehendeth it as his own, this will not only serve him for the understanding of that particular case, but of many others ... Sect. 183b.

Law temporall ... consisteth in three parts, viz, First, on the common law, expressed in our bookes of law, and judiciall records. Secondly, on statutes contained in acts and records of parliament. And thirdly, on customes grounded upon reason, and used time out of minde; and the construction and determination of these doe belong to the judges of the realme. Sect. 344a.

I like Coke.

COMM 317 -- links

2007-01-03T15:12:00.000-06:00

A couple of resources on the World Wide Web that I can use in the first couple of weeks of the mass media law course:

1. How to think like a lawyer: A website called LawNerds.com has a six-part tutorial for law students and pre-law students on how to cultivate a legal frame of mind, legal reasoning and the case method, among other things. Since we will use the case method in COMM 317, read those three sections. If you think you might want to go on to law school (an excellent career choice for communications majors, by the way), take a look at section 4 on what it's like to go to law school, too.

2. Briefing cases. Since we'll be using the case method to study media law, you'll need to learn how to brief a case. It's a special kind of abstract, or summary, that law students learn. And doing it will teach you more about logic than all the liberal arts courses in the world. Start with the basics of "How to Brief a Case" at 4lawschool.com, a website designed, logically enough, for law school students. Follow the links at the bottom to an excellent guide to writing case briefs from the University of Virginia Law School and an even better guide from the John Jay School of Criminal Justice of the City University of New York.

HUM 221 syllabus paste-in revision

2006-12-21T22:34:00.000-06:00

Week 2

Myths of origin and of endurance. Read Zimmerman and Molyneaux, "Disposession,"
pp. 20-35. In Here First, we will read Evelina Zuni Lucero, "On the Tip of My Tongue," pp. 247-61, and Luci Tapahonso, "They Moved Over the Mountain," pp. 337-51, along with her poem "In 1864." On the Web, we will look at: (1) the Haudenosaunee
creation myth at http://sixnations.buffnet.net/Culture/?article=creation
; (2) some traditional Cherokee stories on how things came
to be the way they are; and (3) the "First Thanksgiving"
myth, including (a) an overview in The Christian Science Monitor
at http://www.csmonitor.com/2002/1127/p13s02-lign.html,
(b) the primary historical sources at http://members.aol.com/calebj/thanksgiving.html,
(c) a newspaper story on at what Alaska Natives eat along with
their turkey at http://www.adn.com/life/taste/story/8435558p-8329710c.html
and (d) an essay by folklorist Esaúl Sánchez at
http://www.upenn.edu/pennnews/features/1995/112195/abrahams.html
suggesting one thing the myth does for us. Finally, we will read "A Story of how a Wall Stands" and other poetry by Acaoma Pueblo writer Simon Ortiz linked to the Internet Public Library.

HUM 223 -- today's presentations

2006-12-01T07:42:00.000-06:00

Class is cancelled today. I can't get an answer when I call SCI, but we're on the Channel 20 list of school closings. Those of you who had presentations scheduled today won't have to give them -- I will just count your grade on the written part of your research project.

I'm posting this message to my blogs and the Message Board linked to my faculty page. If you see other students who are in our class, please let them know. And you'll turn in your final exam papers in the Presidents Room at the regularly schduled time Wednesday morning.

If you have questions, please contact me at pellertsen@sci.edu or my email account at peterellertsen@yahoo.com.

-- Doc

New office -- directions

2006-11-28T15:15:00.000-06:00

I'm getting moved into my new office now, so I'm cross-posting directions to my class blogs and the Message Board linked to my faculty page.

I'm in Beata Hall (the old Ursuline convent) across Eastman Street from St. Joe's parish and school. Either Room 31, if you go by the list of room assignments I've been given, or Room 8, if you go by the numbers on the doors. I've also attached my business card to the door.

To get there from Dawson, go out the south entrance and take the walk past Ursuline Academy. You'll go between the buildings, with the old building on the right and the gym on the left. Keep going through the parking lot, and there'll be a porch on the right (women's housing is straight ahead). On the south end of that porch, there's a door with a Christmas decoration. Go in the door, take the stairs just to the left and you'll be on the floor with faculty offices. They're in the hallway to the left at the top of the stairs. It takes a little less time to walk it than it does to give the directions!

Computer and phone are now hooked up ... you can reach me, as before, by phone at 525-1420 ext. 519 and by email at pellertsen@sci.edu. Email is usually better, but the voice mail in my office is working again.

Nov. assessment newsletter -- ARCHIVE

2006-11-26T21:57:00.000-06:00

NUTS & BOLTS

An electronic assessment newsletter
Springfield College in Illinois
-----------------------------------------
November 2006
Vol. 7 No. 4
-----------------------------------------
Editor's Note. Over the holidays, I hope to reconnect
the assessment pages to SCI’s website. Until that
time, I am publishing the assessment newsletter by
email to faculty and staff and archiving it on my
personal weblog at
http://www.teachinglogspot.blogspot.com/. -- Pete
Ellertsen, assessment chair

Santa has your assessment
questionnaires

A couple of quick reminders to get out in the November
newsletter, with the end of the month and the end of
fall semester classes both coming up this week. Also
an update on ominous developments in Washington, D.C.

Classroom assessment forms

Sometime this week, if the disruption from this
month’s move of faculty offices permits it, I hope to
have Classroom Assessment Questionnaires in the
faculty mailboxes at Dawson Hall.

This semester’s questionnaires will give us important
data that will help us devise ways to assess for the
Common Student Learning Objectives we derived from the
SCI mission statement in 2004, so it’s important for
everyone to fill them out and document any changes in
instructional methods.

If you have questions, comments or suggestions, please
contact me by email at pellertsen@sci.edu. As my phone
is hooked up and I learn my new office number, I will
post other contact information to the newsletter.

Feds still push standardized tests?

Speculation over mandatory standardized testing on the
order of the federal No Child Left Behind program
refuses to die down. Even though both houses of
Congress are about to change party leadership, it now
appears the U.S. Education Department may push for it
through the process of negotiating federal
regulations.

We’ll know more early in December, but The Chronicle
of Higher Education reported Nov. 24, “Margaret
Spellings, the education secretary, has decided to
focus on accreditors as part of her ‘action plan’ to
begin the most urgent changes proposed by the
commission. … Next week Ms. Spellings will meet here
with a few dozen accreditors, higher-education
officials, and business leaders in what is being
called an Accreditation Forum to discuss ways to make
the measurement of student learning central to
accreditors' oversight of colleges and universities.”

What’s ominous about this, the Chronicle notes, is
“[i]n the wake of the Democratic takeover of Congress,
the accrediting system is one of the few vehicles Ms.
Spellings almost totally controls to drive her
agenda.” The Chronicle’s headline sums up the story’s
tone: “Spellings Wants to Use Accreditation as a
Cudgel.”

“Many accreditors and college officials view next
week's one-day gathering with varying degrees of
suspicion, especially since several of them were never
formally invited,” reports Chronicle staff writer
Burton Bollag. “Some fear that in the name of
increased accountability Ms. Spellings will try to use
the forum to promote solutions they think are
simplistic, like comparing institutions on the basis
of a few easily quantifiable indicators.”

That sounds like federally mandated standardized
tests. Perhaps more troubling, at least for those of
us who do assessment, is what appears to be an
assumption on the part of the Bush administration
that, well, we aren’t doing assessment.

The Chronicle’s discussion of the issue is worth
quoting at length:

In particular, the agenda circulated for
next week's meeting has caused an uproar among the
accreditors, who say it contains certain incorrect
assumptions. For example, the day is set to kick off
with "a panel presentation by leading experts who will
build a case for change from inputs to outputs."

Critics say that ignores a major shift in accrediting
standards that has been under way for more than a
decade, as accreditors have moved from examining
elements like curricula and the portion of faculty
members with terminal degrees to looking at indicators
of what students have learned. In 1992, as part of the
reauthorization of the Higher Education Act, Congress
required accreditors to take into account student
achievement. In 1998, in another edition of the Higher
Education Act, lawmakers made it the most important
factor for accreditors to consider.

"I'm offended," Steven D. Crow, executive director of
the North Central Association of Colleges and Schools'
Higher Learning Commission, says of the panel on
outputs. "I'm doing that already."

Mr. Crow leads the largest of the six regional
accrediting groups, which together accredit nearly
3,000 institutions. "There is a perception — Secretary
Spellings and [commission] chairman [Charles] Miller
have expressed it in recent speeches — that is over 25
years old, that assumes we're just counting books and
square feet."

It’s hard to figure out what all this may mean for us
at SCI, since, as so often happens, the politicians
are speaking in code words, hints and whispers. But it
all still bears watching.

Reference: Bollag, Burton. “Spellings Wants to Use
Accreditation as a Cudgel.” Chronicle of Higher
Education 24 Nov. 2006.
http://chronicle.com/free/v53/i14/14a00101.htm

Email joke gets Bush's number?

2006-11-08T21:33:00.000-06:00

Here's a joke that was going around on the internet just before Tuesday's congressional elections. It's a little out of date now, since President Bush announced U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's resignation the morning after the elections, but still worth recording exactly as it came in my email.

> Donald Rumsfeld briefed the President this morning.
>
> He told Bush that three Brazilian soldiers were killed in Iraq. To
> everyone's amazement, all of the color ran from Bush's face, then he
> collapsed onto his desk, head in hands, visibly shaken, almost
whimpering.
> Finally, he composed himself and asked Rumsfeld, "Just exactly how
many is
> a brazillion?"

Most of the Bush jokes I've seen are too hostile or edgy to be really funny. This one, maybe because of the egregious pun, is cute.

test test

2006-10-31T12:16:00.000-06:00

Let's insert an image and see if it appears.

Humanities 223 term paper

2006-10-22T19:24:00.000-05:00

HUM 223: Ethnic Music

Springfield College in Illinois

Fall Semester 2006

http://www.sci.edu/classes/ellertsen/humanities/hum223syllabus.html

Music is your own experience, your own thoughts, your wisdom. If you don't live it, it won't come out of your horn. They teach you there's a boundary line to music. But, man, there's no boundary line to art. -- Charlie Parker

Term Paper – Fall 2006

One of your requirements in Humanities 223 is to write a documented term paper (at least 2,000 words or eight pages in 12pt type) and deliver an oral report on some aspect of cultural and artistic expression in traditional music or a commercial genre derived from traditional music. This handout tells you how to do it. The instructions, and updates, will be posted to my teaching blog at http://www.teachinglogspot.blogspot.com/ -- Pete Ellertsen, instructor

Your overall assignment. Choose a musician, band or group whose work you enjoy or whom you want to know more about, and write a paper about their artistic influences; how their culture, their musical genre and/or artistic vision shaped their life and career; how they dealt with issues of commercial and artistic success; and their place in the history of American popular music. You may choose your own topic. But since this is an interdisciplinary humanities/cultural studies class, you will do best if you choose a historical figure or a contemporary musician who has been influenced by long-term musical genres (e.g. country, gospel, blues, jazz and the Anglo-Irish or African American cultural traditions they grew out of). Be sure to clear your topic with me before you begin your research. Your opinions and your response to the artist’s music are an important part of the paper, but you need to research your artists’ careers and respond to their music in order to support your opinion. You may use either MLA or APA style. A “Citation Machine” to help you with correct MLA or APA form is available on my faculty website at http://www.sci.edu/classes/ellertsen/facultypage.html .

How to approach your paper. In researching and writing your paper, you’ll want to address the following points. Not all of them will be appropriate for every paper you write (for example you don’t need to spell out for me that gospel singer Mahalia Jackson wasn’t a drug addict), but you’ll want to touch these bases in your research:

Some biography of your artist or band members, including musical influences, artistic vision (i.e. anything they said about music, like the quote from jazz saxophone player Charlie “Bird” Parker above), and how they made a living from their music. How did they handle the stresses of a musical career, including drug use, road trips, etc.? What compromises, if any, did they make between their artistic vision and commercial success? How successful were they, both artistically and commercially?
How were your artists received in their time? By later generations? By the public? By other musicians? How do you, personally respond to their music? Choose a song, or piece of instrumental music, and ask yourself: (a) What about this music stands out in my mind? (b) What in my cultural background, values, taste and interests makes me react to it that way? (c) What specifically about the music makes me feel that way? Consult my handout on literary reader [or listener] response papers and the sample essay on Kinky Friedman at http://www.sci.edu/classes/ellertsen/rosenblatt.html.
What does your artist’s career tell you about music and the arts, the communications media, the entertainment industry and/or marketing economics in American society? What does it tell you about American popular culture? How well does their music transcend the limitations of its particular genre or cultural background?

In researching the paper, you should both read up on the musicians and listen to some of their music. You will find some sources in the library, others on the Internet. If you have trouble tracking down recordings or sound files, see me and I’ll help out.

Robert M. Seiler of the University of Calgary suggests when his students write around music, they actively listen for the sound of vocals or instrumentals, and the “dynamics or the intensity of the sound, in terms of loudness, uniformity, and change.” He also suggests they listen for:

a. the movement of the piece, i.e., concentrate on its rhythm, meter, and tempo,
b. the pitch, i.e., in terms of its order and melody, and
c. the structure of the piece, i.e., its logic, design, and texture.

Seiler’s tip sheet is available at http://www.acs.ucalgary.ca/~rseiler/music.htm -- his examples are from classical music, but his suggestions work for blues or rock, too. They’re excellent.

Writing about music is a lot like writing about a poem or a play in English classes. In other ways, it's different. Here's what Dartmouth University has to say about one type of music paper:

In a review, you should focus on the form of the music. What sounds make up the music? How does the composer or performer fuse together these different sound elements? How do the different movements work together to create the music's overall effect? Remember to stay away from comments beginning with "I" that reflect only how the music affected you. Instead, question the music using criteria by which we judge excellence, and provide insight into those elements of excellence.

Dartmouth's tip sheet is available on line at http://www.dartmouth.edu/~writing/materials/student/humanities/music.shtml. I recommend it highly.

Who to write about? Any of the artists we have talked about in class are fair game. You can find plenty of information on historical figures like Stephen A. Foster, the Fisk Jubilee Singers or Scott Joplin. Blues and/or jazz vocalists like Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith and Billie Holiday would be good subjects, as would jazz musicians like Louie Armstrong, Charlie Parker or Miles Davis. You can write about gospel singers like Mahalia Jackson, Thomas A. Dorsey (who also sang blues as “Georgia Tom”) or more recent evangelists like Kirk Franklin who mix the music of today with roots music. As you read “Deep Blues” by Robert Palmer, you will learn a lot about Delta and Chicago bluesmen Charlie Patton, Robert Johnson, Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf, as well as the rock artists like Eric Clapton, Stevie Ray Vaughan or the Rolling Stones who emulated their music, and you can use Palmer's book as a starting point for your research. You will get other ideas as we watch “Feel Like Going Home” and other DVDs from Martin Scorese’s PBS series “The Blues” during the remainder of the semester. Just be sure to clear your topic with me first.

What are your deadlines? There are three. You will give me a two-page typewritten proposal by Friday, Nov. 3, in which you tell me which performer(s) you will research and what your tentative thesis is; and list, in MLA or APA format, three to five specific sources you have consulted. Your papers will be due by the week of Thanksgiving, which is the week of Nov. 20-21, but I will schedule your oral presentation, on a first-come-first-served basis, when you turn in your paper. So you are allowed to turn it in early. The presentations will be three to five minutes long, and they will be given during the week after Thanksgiving, Nov. 27-Dec. 1.

If you have questions please don’t hesitate to ask me. The quickest way to get hold of me is to email me at pellertsen@sci.edu.

october assessment newsletter ARCHIVE

2006-10-17T11:57:00.000-05:00

NUTS & BOLTS

An electronic assessment newsletter
Springfield College in Illinois
-----------------------------------------
October 2006
Vol. 7 No. 3
-----------------------------------------
Editor's Note. Until I am able to post to SCI's assessment website again, I am publishing the newsletter by email and archiving it in the interim on my personal weblog at http://www.teachinglogspot.blogspot.com/. -- Pete Ellertsen, assessment chair

Of CATs, Professorenzetteln and assessment

Assessment and government intrusion into the classroom are nothing new. In fact, a recent book by historian William Clark makes a good case they have changed the way we think in Western society over the centuries. The book is “Academic Charisma and the Origins of the Research University,” and it is reviewed in the current issue of The New Yorker.

The review, by Anthony Grafton, makes me want to read the book. It also makes me think his students – and faculty colleagues – at Princteon are a lot like ours at Springfield College and Benedictine.

“Anyone who has ever taught at a college or university must have had this experience,” Grafton begins. He continues by describing the experience:

You’re in the middle of something that you do every day: standing at a lectern in a dusty room, for example, lecturing to a roomful of teen-agers above whom hang almost visible clouds of hormones; or running a seminar, hoping to find the question that will make people talk even though it’s spring and no one has done the reading … Suddenly, you find yourself wondering … [w]hy, in the age of the World Wide Web, do professors still stand at podiums and blather for fifty minutes at unruly mobs of students, their lowered baseball caps imperfectly concealing the sleep buds that rim their eyes? Why do professors and students put on polyester gowns and funny hats and march, once a year, in the uncertain glory of the late spring? … These activities seem both bizarre and disconnected, from one another and from modern life, and it’s no wonder that they often provoke irritation, not only in professional pundits but also in parents, potential donors, and academic administrators.

Well, I can’t speak for anyone else, but I’ve certainly had that experience. And I know what it’s like to try to describe what we do, and why we do it, to outside stakeholders.

Clark’s thesis is that American research universities evolved out academic traditions in 19th-century Germany, and they in turn evolved out of – get this! – bureaucratic policies and procedures in the petty electorates and principalities of the Holy Roman Empire during the 16th and 17th centuries. As Grafton paraphrases him, Clark notes:

Gradually, the bureaucrats devised ways to insure that the academics were fulfilling their obligations. In Vienna, Clark notes, “a 1556 decree provided for paying two individuals to keep daily notes on lecturers and professors”; in Marburg, from 1564 on, the university beadle kept a list of skipped lectures and gave it, quarterly, to the rector, who imposed fines. Others demanded that professors fill in Professorenzetteln, slips of paper that gave a record of their teaching activities. Professorial responses to such bureaucratic intrusions seem to have varied as much then as they do now. Clark reproduces two Professorenzetteln from 1607 side by side. Michael Mästlin, an astronomer and mathematician who taught Kepler and was an early adopter of the Copernican view of the universe, gives an energetic full-page outline of his teaching. Meanwhile, Andreas Osiander, a theologian whose grandfather had been an important ally of Luther, writes one scornful sentence: “In explicating Luke I have reached chapter nine.”

The upshot, according to Clark, was universities evolved ways of measuring learning that satisfied the bureaucrats, when they pushed for “results that looked rational: results that they could codify, sort, and explain to their masters.” During the Middle Ages, testing was largely done in debates known as academic disputations. They came to be replaced by printed dissertations and formal examinations, “exercises that were carefully graded and recorded by those who administered them.” In the language of our own historical era, we might say the new exams and dissertations offered greater transparency to outside stakeholders.

So when we fill out our Classroom Assessment Technique questionnaires at the end of the semester or ask our SCI sophomores to take a fill-in-the-bubble standardized test in the spring, we’re taking part in a government ritual that goes back to the Professorenzetteln of the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation.
There’s a lot more in Grafton’s article than assessment. For example Mark Twain’s description of the time a thousand students “rose and shouted and stamped and clapped, and banged the beer-mugs” when a historian named Theodor Mommsen walked into a Berlin banquet hall in 1892. Or Clark’s new take on the old story of Abelard and Heloise, and its implications for the way we think today. Or what a doctoral exam was like at the University of Göttingen in 1787. Trivia? Sure. But fascinating trivia. And in the end, it helps us answer Grafton’s question – why do we pontificate in front of classrooms, dress up in caps and gowns and, in general, do the things we do in academic life.

Grafton’s article, headlined “The Nutty Professors,” was in the Oct. 10 issue of The New Yorker. It’s fascinating, and it’s still available on line at http://www.newyorker.com/critics/books/articles/061023crbo_books

Assessment committee empaneled

Members of this year’s Assessment Committee are Bob Blankenberger, Brian Carrigan, Dave Holland, Barb Tanzyus and Pete Ellertsen (chair). Student Affairs Dean Kevin Broeckling and Academic Affairs Dean John Cicero are ex officio. Standing meeting time has been tentatively set for 2 p.m. the second Tuesday of the month in the Brinkerhoff Conference Room.

No commission left behind?

The Spellings Commission, named for President Bush’s education secretary Margaret Spellings, has issued its final report. Its recommendations were unchanged from earlier drafts issued in the late summer. Spellings outlined the findings of her Commission on the Future of Higher Education at a Sept. 26 luncheon of the National Press Club and called on Congress to act on a higher ed reform package. The Associated Press and a couple of major metro newspapers including The Christian Science Monitor apparently sent reporters, or assigned them to work the phone a minute or two and get a story. Local reaction stories ran in media markets like Austin, Tex., and Roanoke, Va. And several student publications, including The Cavalier Daily at the University of Virginia and The Daily Star at Northern Illinois University, also ran stories.

But other than that, the commission’s report was greeted by an almost total lack of coverage. It may be significant that during the week of Spellings’ speech a major congressional sex scandal broke out, former U.S. Rep. Mark Foley, R-Fla., resigned his office and Congress recessed until after the November elections.

Inside Higher Ed had a good summary of the report Sept. 27, the day after it was issued. On line at http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2006/09/26/spellings

Miller lets fly at private colleges

2006-09-28T21:36:00.000-05:00

Charles Miller, who chaired U.S. Education Secretary Margaret Spellings' blue-ribbon Commission on the Future of Higher Education, took a >roundhouse swing at private colleges and universities in a "private" cover letter when he submitted the commission's report. The letter, which "was not part of the official document posted on the Education Department’s Web site," was obtained by the Chronicle of Higher Education and quoted today in the Chronicle's News Blog:

In the letter, Mr. Miller shares what he calls “strictly personal observations,” calling the system of financing higher education “dysfunctional.” He writes that “in addition to the lack of transparency regarding pricing, which severely limits the price signals found in a market-based system, there is a lack of the incentives necessary to affect institutional behavior so as to reward innovation and improvement in productivity. Financial systems of higher education instead focus on and reward increasing revenues—a top line structure with no real bottom line.”

In keeping with previous comments he has made, Mr. Miller singled out private colleges for the most criticism, writing that they resist being held accountable, as shown by their opposition to a unit-record system to track students. “What elevates this concern,” he writes, “is the fact that so-called ‘private’ colleges and universities receive a large amount of support from the public, that is, the taxpayer.”

Overall, the report's final version was little changed from the draft approved and released to the public in August. An article headed "Plan would hold colleges accountable for students' learning" in the Sept. 27 Detroit Free-Press by William Douglas of the McClatchy newspaper group details the implications for assessment a little better than most of the press coverage. Douglas writes:

WASHINGTON -- Looking to extend its education policies into colleges and universities, the Bush administration outlined proposals Tuesday that some higher-education officials fear will lead to standardized testing and trample on students' privacy.

Education Secretary Margaret Spellings said sweeping changes were needed to make higher education more affordable and accountable to people who spend tens of thousands of dollars a year to pursue college degrees.

In a speech at the National Press Club, she laid out proposals developed by the Commission on the Future of U.S. Higher Education, which she appointed a year ago. They'd extend to colleges the principles from the No Child Left Behind program, which seeks greater accountability from elementary schools by requiring them to give standardized tests and publicize the results.

"It seems to me there is an encroachment here to substitute the judgment on higher-education matters that ought to be made by presidents and faculty rather than legislators and commissions," said David Warren, president of the National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities. "There is an ever-increasing reach into the academy."

Warren's concern about the tone of the Miller commission report, by the way, has been consistent. It may help explain Miller's blast at private colleges and universities.

Spellings touts NCLB for higher ed?

2006-09-15T11:57:00.000-05:00

Nothing on the Google News site about the U.S. Education Department's hearings on using the Department's rule-making authority to force changes in higher education. Figures. The commercial media have shied away from the issue almost a year now. But an article in The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette on a speech and school visit by Education Secretary Margaret Spellings hints at a higher ed version of No Child Left Behind.

Here's the lede of a story by the Post-Gazette's Eleanor Chute:

Federal officials are taking the No Child Left Behind Act to the next frontier -- higher education.

In Pittsburgh yesterday, U.S. Education Secretary Margaret Spellings said she will be making a policy speech about higher education at the end of this month.

She noted the federal government pays about one-third of the bill, in the form of grants, and basically puts "the money out and hopes for the best."

She said, "That was fine and dandy when higher education was kind of nice to have as opposed to must have. But that's changing more and more.

"We need to be more strategic, smarter, and make sure higher education is more accessible to more people if we're going to continue to be the world's innovator and the world's leader."

Ms. Spellings made the remarks before the National Conference of Editorial Writers at the Sheraton Station Square Hotel.

So it's back again. The idea was bandied about earlier by Charles Miller, chair of Spellings' blue-ribbon Commission on the Future of Higher Education. Then it was backburnered, toned down from a mandate to a suggestion in the final draft of the commission's report. Spellings is expected to release the final report Sept. 26.

While Spellings' prepared remarks to the editorial writers don't detail the commission's higher ed recommendations, she mentioned the subject on a visit she made with a Republican congressman to an elementary school in Findlay, Pa. The Post-Gazette reported:

On higher education, Ms. Spellings acknowledged that the $100 increase in federal Pell grants isn't enough and noted that costs have been rising about 7 percent a year.

"The next part of the debate on higher education is for us to ask why does it cost 7 percent more this year than last year. Is it a better deal to get out of Ohio State in six years or some private college in four?

"All sorts of things that parents want to know and deserve to know and can know and find out about buying a car or going to a restaurant or ordering a book online, you can't find out about on one of the most expensive decisions and one of the most important decisions that you and your child are going to make. ...

"I think we have to start challenging that."

Last month, the federal Commission on the Future of Higher Education recommended standardized tests, federal monitoring of quality and changes in the financial aid system.

Chute, the Post-Gazette's reporter, also paraphrased Spellings as saying "that No Child Left Behind is close to perfect, likening it to Ivory soap."

Well, that's one comparison.

Cultural studies: 'text' and other keywords

2006-09-10T21:08:00.000-05:00

A link to cultural studies professor T.V. Reed’s pop culture website at Washington State University in Pullman, Wash. It includes, among other things, a link to his American Studies/English 471 course syllabus with a PowerPoint presentation in the first week defining keywords.

Among them: Text: "Any unit of meaning isolated for the purposes of cultural analysis."

Examples include "a single image in one commercial" ranging up to "a whole day of television programs."

Says Reed, "Texts can include words, images, sounds, even touch, in various combinations."

Other definitions include: Myth, ideology, encoding/decoding, subculture, hegemony, gender, race. Looks useful

Nuts & Bolts Sept. 2006 ARCHIVE

2006-08-31T11:43:00.000-05:00

NUTS & BOLTS

An electronic assessment newsletter
Springfield College in Illinois
-----------------------------------------
September 2006
Vol. 7 No. 2
-----------------------------------------
Editor's Note. Since I am still unable to post to
SCI's assessment website, I am publishing the
newsletter by email and archiving it in interim on my
personal weblog at http://www.teachinglogspot.blogspot.com/ ... if
representatives of the North Central Association, the
Illinois Board of Higher Education or other outside
stakeholders wish to see SCI's annual Assessment
Report for 2005-2006 or other current information
regarding our assessment program, please direct them
to my personal blog. -- Pete Ellertsen, assessment
chair

* * *

CLASSROOM ASSESSMENT WORKSHOP

September's issue of Nuts & Bolts is coming out a day
early (Aug. 31) to catch faculty members before the
last minute leading up to the Labor Day weekend. (OK,
OK, it's the *next* to last minute.) That's to give
you more time to plan on attending one of the workshop
sessions on Classroom Assessment Techniques we'll
conduct in the next couple of weeks.

The workshop, in the Resource Center on the
lower level of SCI's Becker Library, will be offered
at three times:

(1) Thursday, Sept. 7, from 5:30 to 6:30 p.m.;
(2) Monday, Sept. 11, from 5:30 to 6:30 p.m.; and
(3) Tuesday, Sept. 12, from 2:30 to 3:30 p.m.

Attendance is voluntary, and all interested SCI and
Benedictine University faculty are welcome. We'll talk
about how to find assessment techniques that are
appropriate to the learning goals and objectives in
our syllabi, and I'll show interested instructors some
aids on the World Wide Web that I've found helpful. I
expect the sessions will be small and informal.

The workshop would be especially valuable for new
instructors who may not have experience with CATs (as
classroom assessment techniques are called), but
seasoned instructors are welcome to exchange ideas and
share their experience and insights as well.

MORE POLITICS

In a move that surprised many, U.S. Education
Secretary Margaret Spellings has announced four
hearings nationwide on whether recommendations of the
federal Commission on the Future of Higher Education
"can be put in place through federal regulation"
through a procedure known as the negotiated
rule-making process. One area up for review, according
to an Aug. 18 announcement in the Federal Register, is
accreditation.

No one in higher education is able to say exactly what
the Department wants to do about accreditation,
according to Doug Lederman of the online newsletter
Inside Higher Ed:

"The Spellings commission’s report takes broad shots
at the perceived ineffectiveness and dysfunction of
the system of voluntary regional and national
accreditation, but offers relatively few firm
proposals for transforming it. So while there are no
obvious changes in accreditation that might emerge
from regulatory negotiations, the department could see
itself as having broad latitude to impose new
requirements on accreditors and, in turn, on colleges,
some observers speculate."

While staff-written working papers presented to the
commission in the spring and early drafts of its
report were quite acrimonious about accreditation,
along with other perceived failures in higher ed, the
hostile tone had largely dropped out of the final
draft, which was approved early in August. With the
hostility, most references to accreditation were also
backburnered.

In an article in the current issue of The Chronicle of
Higher Education, Kelly Field catches the uncertainty
that has greeted the commission's latest regulatory
tack. Field also ties the issue to President Bush's
larger political agenda:

"... some college lobbyists still wondered why an
administration that had shown little interest in
higher education during its first term was suddenly so
concerned with its future. Some speculated that the
administration was trying to divert attention from its
unpopular No Child Left Behind Act, the 2002 law that
imposed testing on the nation's elementary and
secondary schools; others suspected that it was
seeking to extend that law's reach into the college
classroom.

"To the suspicious, the secretary's choice of a
commission chairman seemed proof of a plot to
institute standardized testing at colleges. Charles
Miller, a millionaire investor and close friend of
both Ms. Spellings and President Bush, was best known
for devising a Texas public-school accountability
system that became the model for No Child Left Behind.
He was also associated with accountability testing at
the University of Texas System, where he led the Board
of Regents from 2001 to 2004."

Field adds:

"The swiftness of the secretary's response took some
college lobbyists by surprise. They said the
administration's announcement, which appeared in the
August 18 edition of the Federal Register, signaled
that the secretary did not want to lose any momentum
for change created by the commission's deliberations.

"So far, the administration has given few clues about
which recommendations it might consider as part of the
negotiated rule making — a process by which federal
agencies work with affected parties as regulations are
drafted."

All of this may well affect us at SCI and Benedictine,
because assessment is a politically driven process and
its political underpinnings may be changing.

Hearings will be held in California, Florida,
Washington, D.C., and Chicago. The Chicago hearing
will be Oct. 19 at Loyola University.

Works Cited

Field, Kelly. "Uncertainty Greets Report on Colleges
by U.S. Panel." Chronicle of Higher Education Sept. 1,
2006. http://chronicle.com/free/v53/i02/02a00101.htm

Lederman, Doug. "Regulatory Activism?" Inside Higher
Ed Aug. 21, 2006.
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2006/08/21/regs

Nassirian, Barmak. "U.S. Department of Education
Formally Plans for 'Negotiated Rulemaking'." AACRAO
Transcript [American Association of Collegeate
Registrars and Admissions Officers] Aug. 30, 2006. http://www.aacrao.org/transcript/index.cfm?fuseaction=show_view&doc_id=3294

Nuts & Bolts Aug. 2006 ARCHIVE

2006-08-15T12:53:00.000-05:00

NUTS & BOLTS

An electronic assessment newsletter
Springfield College in Illinois
-----------------------------------------
August 2006
Vol. 7 No. 1
-----------------------------------------
Editor's Note. Until I can get access to SCI's new
assessment website, I will publish the
newsletter by email and archive current issues on an
interim basis on my personal weblog at
http://www.teachinglogspot.blogspot.com/ ... SCI’s
Common Student Learning Objectives and instructors’
guide "Classroom Assessment for Continuous
Improvement" are linked to SCI’s homepage at
http://www.sci.edu. [One change has been made in the archived copy since the original was emailed Aug. 14, to reflect a change in schedule. The third workshop will now be from 2:30 to 3:30 p.m. Tuesday, Sept. 12.]

* * *

CLASSROOM ASSESSMENT WORKSHOPS IN SEPTEMBER

Next month new (and not-so-new) instructors are
invited to a workshop at which I will briefly explain
how SCI’s Common Student Learning Objectives (SLOs)
were derived from our mission statement; and how
Course Based SLOs relate to daily lessons and
assignments. I will assist instructors in choosing
Classroom Assessment Techniques appropriate to the
SCI and/or Benedictine University mission statement
and the goals, objectives and outcomes in the courses
you teach. The workshop, in the Resource Center on the
lower level of SCI's Becker Library, will be offered
at three times:
(1) Thursday, Sept. 7, from 5:30 to 6:30 p.m.;
(2) Monday, Sept. 11, from 5:30 to 6:30 p.m.; and
(3) Tuesday, Sept. 12, from 2:30 to 3:30 p.m.
Attendance is voluntary, and all interested SCI and
Benedictine University faculty are welcome to
participate.

Here's a four-point summary of SCI’s philosophy of
assessment, prepared for a recent meeting of teachers
in the “Triple A” or adult accelerated associate’s
degree program. That’s 10 fewer points than Edwards
Deming, the management guru whose theories are
reflected in our learning outcomes assessment program
at SCI. But assessment isn’t rocket science – I want
to keep it simple.

1. Assessment is externally mandated, but it can be a
valuable part of what we do in the classroom. Let’s be
blunt about it. In higher ed no less than in the
public schools, we are mandated by outside
stakeholders – mostly the state and federal
governments – to do assessment. It’s part of the
political demand for “accountability” that gave us the
No Child Left Behind Act at the K-12 level, and this
summer some of us are nervously watching a blue-ribbon
federal commission as it debates ways of politicizing
higher ed as well. But assessment isn’t rocket science
– I define it as nothing more than using several
different ways of finding out what our students learn.
Some are embedded in work they do for grades; others
aren’t. But they can all help us teach better. At SCI,
we have designed an assessment program that addresses
accountability to outside stakeholders mostly at the
institutional level, by requiring standardized tests
of our sophomores and making sure our course offerings
and objectives square with the statewide Illinois
Articulation Initiative. That leaves our classroom
teachers free to assess student learning outcomes
(which basically means what the students learn) to
improve our teaching over the course of the semester –
when there’s still time to plug the assessment results
back into our planning processes.

2. Classroom assessment at SCI is “formative,” which
means we use the results immediately to improve our
teaching. There are several highly effective classroom
assessment techniques (known as CATs for short). One
that many of us like is the “one-minute paper.” At the
end of class, we’ll have the students write briefly on
two questions designed to get at what they learned:
(1) What was the clearest point in tonight’s class?
(2) What was the most confusing point? I think it’s
very useful. It’s humbling when I realize I led my
students off on a tangent when some off-the-cuff
remark keeps showing up as the clearest point, but
it’s good to know so I can get us all back on track
the following week. And I know to clear up the most
confusing point while I’m at it. This approach is what
educators call “formative assessment.” Carol Boston of
the University of Maryland defines it as the
“diagnostic use of assessment to provide feedback to
teachers and students over the course of instruction.”
It’s what we stress at SCI.

3. Classroom assessment is not rocket science, but it
is grounded in the scientific method of testing and
refining our data. Most of our classes are too small
for us to attempt statistical analysis with any rigor.
So classroom assessment, at least at SCI, is more an
art than a science. There’s a quote I like from Peter
Ewell, one of the pioneers in learning outcomes
assessment, on the Southern Illinois at Edwardsville
classroom assessment website: “Why do we insist on
measuring it with a micrometer when we mark it with
chalk and cut it with an axe?" My answer: We don’t
try, but we do learn how to heft an axe. That SIUE
website, by the way, is one of the best places to
start learning about CATs, and I recommend it highly.
I also recommend our instructors’ guide, Classroom
Assessment for Continuous Improvement, available as a
PDF document on the SCI website. I like it partly
because I wrote it. But it shares some good ideas from
other SCI instructors, and I think it explains the
philosophy behind assessment at SCI. It’s called
planning for continuous improvement, and it boils down
to a four-step process: (1) Plan something, a lesson
or a course; (2) Do it, at least get it started and
measure its interim success; (3) Study the data from
those measurements; and (4) Act or adjust your
procedures in light of your analysis of the data. The
idea is borrowed from industrial management, where
it’s known as a PDSA cycle, but behind it is nothing
more complicated than the scientific method. Most
important, it works in the classroom as well as it
does on the shop floor.

4. Our organizational culture at SCI is receptive to
assessment, and you can find plenty of help. Just ask
us. Your syllabi, for example, are full of numbers and
letters that relate the goals and objectives of
individual courses to the SCI mission statement. They
may be puzzling at first! It’s a new system, and we’re
still working out kinks. But most of us are adapting
to it. So we’ll be able to help you figure out what
all the letters and numbers mean, and how they relate
to what you do in the classroom. But we’ll also be
very sympathetic. We’ve been puzzled ourselves.
Sometimes I still get confused! But I take comfort in
point No. 3 above: Assessment isn’t rocket science, it
involves a continuous learning process and it takes
time to master. Ask your division chairs for help. Or
please feel free to contact me. I’m easiest to reach
by email … at pellertsen!@sci.edu.

FEDERAL TESTING MANDATE?

A federal Commission on the Future of Higher Education
that threatens to change the way we do assessment at
SCI, and everywhere else in higher ed, appears to have
backed off on its most extreme proposals for a “one
size fits all” federally mandated standardized testing
program. The commission, chaired by Bush
administration insider Charles Miller of Texas,
adopted its final report this month. An Associated
Press story sums it up like this:

“A national commission charged with
plotting the future of American higher education
approved its final recommendations Thursday, calling
on the government to provide more aid based on
financial need, while telling colleges to be more
accountable for what students learn.

A commission member representing nonprofit colleges
declined to sign on, however, saying the report
reflected too much of a "top down" approach to reform.

The report, which will be delivered to Education
Secretary Margaret Spellings in final form next month,
recommends that the federal government consolidate its
more than 20 financial aid programs and ensure that
Pell Grants - the main aid program for low-income
students - cover at least 70 percent of in-state
tuition costs. In 2004-2005, the grants covered less
than half.

But it says that colleges should do more to hold down
costs, and to better measure what students learn.
The 19-member commission, created by Spellings, has no
direct power, but has been closely watched by
policy-makers. Because of its diverse membership -
industry, government and for-profit and traditional
colleges are represented - any recommendations all
members agreed on would carry substantial weight as
Congress, the White House and state governments
consider education measures in the future.
(Pope)

The vote was 18-1. David Ward, president of the
American Council on Education, was the dissenting
member. Associated Press education reporter Justin
Pope noted that Ward “was the primary voice of
traditional colleges on the commission, and his
refusal to sign on could dilute the report's
influence.”

In the meantime, a snippet tucked into a report in
the online newsletter Higher Ed Today suggests a
partial retreat from commission chair Charles Miller's
insistence on a uniform national standarized testing
regimen. It also suggests testing will be one of the
footballs the politicans plan to kick around. The
snippet reads as follows:

Speaking to reporters after the vote,
Miller said his preference would be for “the academy
[itself] to address” the changes called for in the
report, and as evidence of his desire not to impose
mandates on higher education, he noted that the report
the commission approved Thursday had dropped language
(which was in last week’s draft) that called for
states to require public institutions to measure
student learning using a set of tests and other
measures. (The new language, which college leaders
pushed hard for in the last few days, just says that
“higher education institutions should measure student
learning using....")

If higher education is “not responsive to change” and
“doesn’t have a strategic vision,” Miller predicted,
then “things are going to be mandated.”
(Lederman)

I want to see the final draft before I try to read too
much into this. But I think it may be a hopeful sign
whatever new testing regimen emerges from all this
won't be too intrusive. A fuller discussion is posted
to my "teaching b/log" at
http://teachinglogspot.blogspot.com/

-- Pete Ellertsen, editor, Nuts & Bolts

Works Cited

Boston, Carol. “The concept of formative assessment.”
Practical Assessment, Research & Evaluation 8.9
(2002). 7 Aug. 2006.
http://pareonline.net/getvn.asp?v=8&n=9

Classroom Assessment for Continuous Improvement: A
Guide for Instructors. SCI. 2005. 7 Aug. 2006. PDF
file linked to http://www.sci.edu/assessment-site.htm

“Classroom Assessment Techniques.” University of
Southern Illinois at Edwardsville. n.d. 7 Aug. 2006.
http://www.siue.edu/~deder/assess/catmain.html

Lederman, Doug. “18 Yesses, 1 Major No.” Inside Higher
Ed 11 Aug. 2006. 14 Aug. 2006.
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2006/08/11/commission

Pope, Justin. “Higher Education Report Gets OK.
Seattle Post-Intelligencer 10 Aug. 2006. 14 Aug. 2006.
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/national/1110AP_Higher_Education_Commission.html

Miller panel backs off on testing?

2006-08-14T12:40:00.000-05:00

Now that the U.S. Education Department's blue-ribbon Commission on the Future of Higher Education has approved a draft report, there will be plenty of time to look at its implications for testing and assessment. It goes to Education Secretary Margaret Spellings next month, and then it is expected to be threshed out in a political process involving any number of government, industry and, hopefully, educational stakeholders.

In the meantime, a snippet tucked into a report in the online newsletter Inside Higher Ed suggests a partial retreat from commission chair Charles Miller's insistence on a uniform national standarized testing regimen. It also suggests testing will be one of the footballs the politicans plan to kick around. The snippet reads as follows:

Speaking to reporters after the vote, Miller said his preference would be for “the academy [itself] to address” the changes called for in the report, and as evidence of his desire not to impose mandates on higher education, he noted that the report the commission approved Thursday had dropped language (which was in last week’s draft) that called for states to require public institutions to measure student learning using a set of tests and other measures. (The new language, which college leaders pushed hard for in the last few days, just says that “higher education institutions should measure student learning using....")

If higher education is “not responsive to change” and “doesn’t have a strategic vision,” Miller predicted, then “things are going to be mandated.”

I want to see the final draft before I try to read too much into this. But I think it may be a hopeful sign whatever new testing regimen emerges from all this won't be too intrusive.

SCI annual assessment report / ARCHIVE

2006-08-14T10:40:00.000-05:00

ANNUAL ASSESSMENT REPORT
Springfield College in Illinois
Academic Year 2005-2006

* * *

Editor’s Note. Since SCI went over to a new website in
July 2006, I have been unable to access the assessment
portion of the website. Until the remaining technical
bugs can be worked out, I am archiving current
reports, newsletters and other postings relating to
student learning outcomes assessment at SCI on my
personal weblog at
http://www.teachinglogspot.blogspot.com/ -- Peter
Ellertsen, chair, Assessment Committee.

* * *

Because SCI was reaccredited during the 2005-2006
academic year, the Assessment Committee’s activities
were heavily influenced by the site visit for
reaccreditation purposes that took place in November
2005. Before the visit, the committee’s focus was on
getting ready for the site visit; afterward, its focus
shifted to the preliminary stages of planning to
maintain and further develop elements of the college’s
Assessment Plan as adopted in 1996, amended in 2001
and implemented during the time intervening between
those dates and the present.

A key part of the plan, and one that received a great
deal of attention as it was initiated over the summer
and fall terms in 2005 was the implementation of a new
syllabus format incorporating the Common Student
Learning Objectives (CSLOs) adopted at a faculty
workshop in December 2004 and derived from SCI’s
stated mission of preparing students for lives of
“learning, leadership and service in a diverse world”
into Course Based Student Learning Objectives (CBSLOs)
and into individual assignments and assessment
activities by individual instructors and as part of
the college’s program and institutional effectiveness
assessment programs. Beginning in the fall semester,
all syllabi submitted to the Office of the Dean of
Academic Affairs from traditional and adult
accelerated associate’s level courses follow the new
format, and workshops were held in the summer and fall
of 2005 to help instructors follow the new format and
choose Classroom Assessment Techniques that will help
them perform both formative assessment during the
course of the semester and summative assessment at
semester’s end in a cycle of continuous improvement of
classroom instruction. In addition, the chair of the
Assessment Committee wrote a 45-page booklet entitled
"Classroom Assessment for Continuous Improvement." It
was given to workshop attendees in summer of 2005 and
posted to the college’s website at www.sci.edu as a
PDF document. Additional workshops for new faculty are
scheduled in September 2006.

During the site visit in November, members of the
Assessment Committee were informed verbally that
members of the site visit team were favorably
impressed with the degree to which SCI has developed
an organizational culture that is receptive to
assessment, and this impression was repeated in the
written report issued in December and formalized in
June 2006 (please see below for details). At the same
time, members of the site visit panel made in clear in
verbal communication that the SCI’s progress to date
is expected to continue as the 1996/2001 Assessment
Plan is fleshed out and further implemented. Along
with the accolade came what members of the Assessment
Committee interpreted as further marching orders.

After the site visit, the Committee’s focus shifted
toward maintenance of ongoing parts of the Assessment
Plan and planning toward expansion of the assessment
program as the Plan is further implemented. Program
assessment continued apace, as members of the
Assessment Committee continued to develop a matrix
showing with CSLOs and CBSLOs are reflected in General
Education courses and worked with outside stakeholders
in the evaluation and improvement of curricula,
particularly with regard to science. Standardized
tests purchased from ACT Inc. were purchased and
administered at the end of March, and efforts began to
study and interpret test results over time since the
reading module has been administered now since 2003
and a math test has been added. The small size of
SCI’s student population makes it imperative that data
accrue over time, and that they be interpreted
carefully since the data pool is only beginning to be
large enough, at least in the case of reading scores,
for valid statistical analysis. Details are reported
below.

Priorities for the coming 2006-2007 academic year will
be set by the committee in its September and October
meetings. It is expected that they will continue to
focus on fuller implementation of the 1996/2001
Assessment Plan, especially with regard to program
assessment, further efforts to reflect specific parts
of the mission statement and CSLOs in classroom
assessment of individual lessons and assignments, and
the completion of feedback loops and other
communication of learning outcomes data throughout the
college so these data can be consciously utilized in
decision-making processes.

Accreditation

After a site visit in November, the Higher Learning
Commission of the North Central Association of
Colleges and Schools formally renewed Springfield
College in Illinois' accreditation for 10 years. The
NCA site visit team's Comprehensive Evaluation report
said its inspection "confirm[ed] the institution's
capacity and responsibility to identify and address
issues," including a good half dozen issues of
long-standing concern to the accrediting body. The
panel noted that SCI's partnership with Benedictine
University was a crucial factor in granting continued
accreditation. After noting "major improvements since
the inception of the partnership," it reported in its
summary of findings:

The faculty and staff are qualified, dedicated, and
hopeful; in addition, recently hired staff are
bringing new perspectives to the institution. It was
clear from discussions with the Benedictine University
President and the Chair of its Board of Trustees, that
Benedictine is fully committed to the partnership.
With the University's leadership and its advantageous
presence in the state capital, Springfield College
should be able to continue to fulfill its mission.
While the team anticipates growing pains in relation
to the partnership, it should be possible to overcome
them. In short, it seems clear that Springfield
College in Illinois, in partnership with Benedictine
Univrsity, is now a viable institution with prospects
for a positive future.

Regarding assessment, the site visit committee
reported, “"It is clear from considerable
documentation and a variety of personal conversations
that SCI has made considerable progress in creating a
culture of assessment on campus, with a specific focus
on classroom-level assessment." The following evidence
was cited:

1. The development of common student learning outcomes
across the curriculum [citation omitted].
2. The requirement that each faculty member declare
the methods of course assessment as part of each
course syllabus.
3. The requirement that each faculty member submit an
end-of-course assessment report to the Dean which
identifies specific classroom assessment techniques
used, the findings from those assessments, and action
taken [citation omitted].
4. Course syllabi in both the traditional two-year
program and the accelerated degree program routinesly
list objectives related to either Common Student
Learning Objectives or Course-Based Learning
Objectives identified by the College and explicitly
related to the College's mission.
5. Testimony from students indicated that faculty use
classroom assessment techniques daily and that these
assessments result in clear changes in classes.
6. Interviews with a number of faculty demonstrate a
high degree of awareness of the assessment effort, and
a desire to use that process to improve
classroom-level instruction.

The site visit committee noted two other aspects of
the assessment plan - an annual review of courses to
"ensure that Illinois Articulation Initiatives are
met," and our program review process. "Following a
review," the panel noted, "the theater program was
placed on indefinite inactive status. Review of the
forensics program to determine the future of the
program has included two external evaluators. These
program reviews indicate the institution is reviewing
the effectiveness of the programs."

In addition, the site visit team noted a long-standing
overall commitment to good teaching and student
learning at SCI. It cited the way faculty members are
"evaluated by department chairs, students, and the
Dean of Academic Affairs," and the "classroom visits
and evaluations are discussed with faculty and affect
tenure decisions," as well as decisions on rehiring
adjunct instructors. Also credited were the LaFata and
Distinguished Teaching Awards and SCI's computer labs
and utilization of "limited rsources to improve
classrooms and maintain the cleanliness of the
grounds, common spaces, and classrooms." Especially
commended was the new Resource Center on the lower
level of Becker Library

Standardized testing

The Collegiate Assessment of Academic Proficiency
(CAAP) tests in reading and math were administered at
the end of March. On the CAAP reading test, SCIr
students who took it (n = 87) scored an average of
59.0; the nationwide reference group of second-year
students in private two-year colleges scored an
average of 60.4. That is slightly less than the
national average. But SCI students in 2005 averaged
61.2 on the reading test, compared to 60.4 nationwide,
and in 2004 SCI students' score was 59.9 compared to
60.3 nationwide. The college’s first math scores were
as follows: Students students averaged 56.5 as
compared to 56.1 nationally. Math scores will not be
statistically significant until the test has been
administered one or two years longer and more data
accrue.

In addition, SCI purchased from ACT Inc. a linkage
report providing a “value added” benchmark for
measuring how much SCI students learned about reading
and math in their college years. ACT Inc., the vendor,
explains: "This report contains an analysis of
performance for students who tested with the ACT
Assessment on entry to college and CAAP after general
education work has been completed. ... Because the
content specifications of some pairs of ACT Assessment
and CAAP tests are similar, it is possible to track
student performance for your cohort." The linkage
results:

· In reading, 18 percent of those SCI students who
took both the ACT test in high school and the CAAP
test this year (n = 60) made lower than expected
progress on the CAAP test as compared to 14 percent of
the nationwide reference group; 75 percent made
expected progress, compared to 75 percent of the
national group; and 7 percent made higher than on CAAP
compared to 11 percent of the national group.

· In math, 10 percent of the SCI students who took
both tests made lower than expected progress on the
CAAP test compared to 12 percent of the reference
group; 82 percent made expected progress, compared to
79 percent nationally; and 8 percent made higher than
expected progress, as compared to 9 percent of the
national group.

Over the summer, a subcommittee was empaneled to take
an exploratory look at all the CAAP test results and
make some preliminary decisions on how they can be
utilized as a planning tool for continuous improvement
of instruction. Serving on it were Academic Affairs
dean John Cicero, Languages and Literature chair Amy
Lakin, and math instructor Barb Tanzyus. Peter
Ellertsen, chair of the assessment committee, convened
the subcommittee. It met in June, and took the
following action:

(1) Ms. Lakin volunteered to suggest a flow chart
whereby student learning outcomes assessment data are
to be transmitted through the Office of the Dean of
Academic Affairs to the Board of Trustees, the chief
operating and fiscal officer and others engaged in
making budgetary decisions, in response to a
suggestion in the NCA site visit committee's report,
that "As the institution advances the Outcomes
Assessment program, it may consider integrating
requests developed as a result of assessment into the
budgeting and planning processes. Many of the
recommendations for change will be for curriculum or
pedagogical changes. However, other recommendations
will require resource allocations which must be
weighed against other budgetary requests. When the
institution gives priority to the assessment generated
resource requests, the result is to create even more
interest in the assessment outcomes." (p. 4). Ms.
Lakin’s recommendation will be submitted to the full
Assessment Committee at the beginning of the 2006-2007
school year.

(2) Ms. Tanzyus volunteered to assign the CAAP test
data to her baccalaureate statistics students for
analysis during the 2006-2007 school year, as a
preliminary step toward analysis of the data received
to date and determination of how these data can be
used as a tool for planning and budgeting for
continuous improvement of teaching and learning at SCI
as well as maximizing student learning outcomes and
institutional effectiveness in the academic domain. This will be an ongoing project.

Gray lady inks higher ed report

2006-08-11T12:53:00.000-05:00

Final adoption of a report by the federal Commission on the Future of Higher Education got some media play, mostly from an Associated Press story in papers including The Los Angeles Times, Forbes and The Dallas Morning News and a New York Times news service story that ran in the Gray Lady herself and got picked up by papers including The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, The Minneapolis Star-Tribune, The Register Guard in Portland, Ore., and The Gainesville (Fla.) Sun.

Today's Chicago Trib carried the AP story, with a graf contributed by staff reporter Jodi S. Cohen. It was a quote from a top University of Illinois administrator, and it demonstrates why some educators wonder if the commission didn't get in over its head just a little, especially on testing issues:

Richard Herman, chancellor of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, said the best measure of success is what students do after college.

"I am not opposed to the idea of additional measurements, but . . . using a limited number of metrics to measure the success of a college education is inaccurate," Herman said. "Our mission, I believe, is to prepare tomorrow's leaders. I would argue on those grounds that we have been enormously successful. Tell me what written test measures that."

In spite of the sweeping nature of the blue-ribbon commission's mandate, Sam Dillon's lede in The Times managed to get it all in:

WASHINGTON, Aug. 10 — A federal commission approved a final report on Thursday that urges a broad shake-up of American higher education. It calls for public universities to measure learning with standardized tests, federal monitoring of college quality and sweeping changes in financial aid.

The panel also called on policy makers and leaders in higher education to find new ways to control costs, saying college tuition should grow no faster than median family income, although it opposed price controls.

The report recommended bolstering Pell grants, the basic building block of federal student aid, by making the program cover a larger percentage of public college tuition. That proposal could cost billions of dollars.

Didllon's story, like the AP story, noted that David Ward of the American Council on Education refused to sign off on the report and explained his refusal to sign is significant because ACE is "the largest association of colleges and universities [and Ward] was the most powerful representative of the higher education establishment on the commission."

Dillon's story noted that controversial language in earlier drafts of the report was toned down at the last minute. Some of it involved standardized testing:

... in the last six weeks, the commission issued six drafts, watering down passages that had drawn criticism and eliminating one this week, written by Mr. Miller, that had encouraged expanding private loans as a share of student financial aid.

A proposal on standardized tests was also weakened at the last moment. Previous drafts said that “states should require” public universities to use standardized test, but the final version said simply that universities “should measure student learning” with standardized tests.

How that policy recommendation translates into actual mandates, of course, remains to be seen.

The commission was formed in September 2005 to discuss access, accountability and cost issues and to report to U.S. Education Secretary Margaret Spellings in a year's time. What happens next is not clear, although commission chair Charles Miller envisions more consultation with corporate and government leaders. He didn't mention educators, but that may be an oversight in the New York Times story. Dillon reported:

The members seemed at odds on how to carry their recommendations forward. Some, like former Gov. James B. Hunt Jr. of North Carolina, called on President Bush to incorporate them in the Congressional agenda.

Mr. Miller said the next step should be more “national dialogue” with governors and corporate leaders. He seemed upset by what he characterized as wrangling with representatives of the status quo.

“You can’t act on the recommendations today because you encounter one set of defenders and then behind them another set of defenders, and you get into all these battles,” he told reporters after the panel voted.

Dillon's story noted that some member organizations represted in ACE have endorsed drafts of the report, including the American Association of State Colleges and Universities and the American Association of Community Colleges. Other reaction was more in line with Ward's. Said Dillon:

Other important groups in the council issued withering critiques.

The Association of American Universities, which represents 60 top research universities, noted that the report “deals almost exclusively with undergraduate education.”

Robert M. Berdahl, a former chancellor at the University of California, Berkeley, who is president of the universities association, said, “What is needed is something much richer, with a more nuanced understanding of the educational engagement and how it is undertaken.” said

Another council member, the National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities, which represents 900 private institutions including liberal arts colleges, major research universities and church- and other faith-related colleges, attacked the recommendation to develop a national database to follow individual students’ progress as a way of holding colleges accountable for students’ success.

The association called the proposal a dangerous intrusion on privacy, saying, “Our members find this idea chilling.”

Several groups said the report spent much ink discussing increases in students’ work skills, while slighting the mission of colleges and universities to educate students as citizens.

Higher ed head nixes higher ed report

2006-08-10T14:51:00.000-05:00

As expected, the blue-ribbon Commission on the Future of Higher Education has gotten behind the third draft of a report to U.S. Education Secretary Margaret Spellings. The Associated Press is moving the story on today's wire and, surprisingly, The Seattle Post-Intelligencer and other papers are picking it up.

The final draft is toned down considerably from the hostile and abusive language of earlier versions, but David Ward, president of the American Council on Education, refused to sign on, saying, as The AP put it, "the report reflected too much of a 'top down' approach to reform." In a bylined story, AP education writer Justin Pope reported:

In the end, after weeks of negotiations and several drafts, Chairman Charles Miller brought all but one commissioner on board. However the one holdout, David Ward of the American Council on Education, was the primary voice of traditional colleges on the commission, and his refusal to sign on could dilute the report's influence.

Ward said he supported many of the commission's objectives, but opposed "one-size fits all" prescriptions that fail to reflect the differing mission of colleges.

Still, Ward noted several current and past college presidents on the commission signed on to the report at a meeting in Washington, D.C. He said colleges would pay close attention to its calls for reform.

"They now realize if they don't do it to themselves, somebody will do it to them," he said.

One of those "one size fits all" recommendations deals with mandated standardized testing. Others relate to unspecified standard accountability measures that would allow national comparisons of student learning (which may be a way of saying more standardized testing in the pedagese language). We'll see.

But assessment and accountability are not the only, or even the major, focus of the commission. Pope's summary for AP is brief, but accurate:

The report, which will be delivered to Education Secretary Margaret Spellings in final form next month, recommends that the federal government consolidate its more than 20 financial aid programs and ensure that Pell Grants - the main aid program for low-income students - cover at least 70 percent of in-state tuition costs. In 2004-2005, the grants covered less than half.

But it says that colleges should do more to hold down costs, and to better measure what students learn.

The 19-member commission, created by Spellings, has no direct power, but has been closely watched by policy-makers. Because of its diverse membership - industry, government and for-profit and traditional colleges are represented - any recommendations all members agreed on would carry substantial weight as Congress, the White House and state governments consider education measures in the future.

All the implications of this panel's recodmmendations are not clear yet. But I'll bet somebody makes a lot of money out of them!

Nuts & Bolts July 2006 / ARCHIVE

2006-07-21T14:16:00.000-05:00

NUTS & BOLTS

An electronic assessment newsletter
Springfield College in Illinois
-----------------------------------------

July 2006
Vol. 6 No. 11
-----------------------------------------

Editor's Note. It now looks like it'll be a while
before I can get SCI's assessment website up and
running again. In the meantime, I plan to publish the
newsletter by email and archive current issues on an
interim basis on my personal weblog at
http://www.teachinglogspot.blogspot.com/ ... back
issues through June 2006, as well as the teaching
blog, can be accessed from my faculty page at
http://www.sci.edu/classes/ellertsen/welcome.html

* * *

Stuff happens, to paraphrase (but not quote) a popular
bumper sticker. I had planned to put Nuts & Bolts on
hiatus while I reorganized parts of SCI's assessment
website, but there's information I think I should get
out to faculty on a timely basis. So this email
message will serve as a short version of Nuts & Bolts,
SCI's monthly assessment newsletter, updating you on:
(1) reminders, tips and links relating to fall
semester syllabi, which are due in late July and early
August; and (2) developments on the federal Commission
on the Future of Higher Education, which is
deliberating radical changes in the way we do
institutional assessment.

1. Syllabi

If you've taught before at SCI and/or Benedictine
University at SCI, you're in luck. You don't have any
changes in the syllabus format to wrestle with this
year. Mary Jo Rappe of the Academic Affairs Office is
sending out detailed instructions with deadlines for
SCI's traditional and adult accelerated programs, as
well the various Benedictine modules.

If you're new, Mary Jo's instructions will show you
how to format a syllabus. And your division chair will
be able to help you work with student learning
objectives, learning outcomes and the other details of
a college syllabus.

In either event, syllabi are to be submitted this year
to your division chairs for approval.

With government and other outside stakeholders
dictating more and more of what goes on in the
classroom, our syllabi may seem more complicated than
what you remember from when you were in school. But
once you get the hang of it, it'll make sense. And
you'll wonder what all the fuss was about.

As assessment coordinator, I will be happy to offer
informal advice on how to incorporate goals,
objectives and assessment criteria into your syllabi.
I can be reached by email at pellertsen@sci.edu ...
and we have on the SCI website a 45-page PDF document
entitled "Classroom Assessment for Continuous
Improvement" that walks you through SCI's Common
Student Learning Objectives and other details.

Published in 2005, the classroom assessment guide
summarizes some basic principles of quality
improvement planning and offers tips on how to carry
it out in the classroom by means of formative
assessment. Unlike other parts of the assessment
website at the moment, it can be reached from our
homepage at www.sci.edu ... click on the Quick Link to
"Faculty and Student Websites" and then on "Assessment
Program Goals and Objectives" in the website directory
that opens. That will take you to a new page headed
"Program Goals and Objectives." Scroll down to the
heading "Classroom assessment" and click on the link
thqat says "Guide for Instructors (pdf)." It's
important to keep scrolling down, because on most
browsers you won't be able to see the classroom
assessment links at first.

If your head's swimming from all these details,
remember all of this stuff is like walking, breathing
or riding a bicycle. It's a lot easier to just *do* it
than it is to try to explain it!

2. Federal politicking

The blue-ribbon Commission on the Future of Higher
Education, empaneled in September 2005 and due to
issue a report in September of this year, has released
a second draft report considerably less hostile to
classroom educators than its first draft. Assessment
is hardly even mentioned in this draft, at least it
isn't reflected in press coverage, but nationwide
standardized testing is still looming in the
background.

Reports the online newletter Inside Higher Ed:

"Taken together, the changes made in response to
commissioners’ criticisms of the initial report — many
of which focused on its tendency to favor
harsh-sounding and simplistic rhetoric and
recommendations over practical, well-conceived
analysis and answers — do not radically alter the
panel’s bottom line view: that higher education must
perform better in educating students and in proving
its value to the American public.

"And many if not most of the initial draft’s findings
and recommendations remain intact, a fact many college
officials will rue. The second draft, like the first,
calls for the creation of a national “unit records”
system to track students’ performance through their
academic careers and into the work place (though it
calls the proposal something else), and urges the
collection and publication of significantly more
information that colleges have either not collected
or, more often, held close to the vest.

"But in case after case, the second draft shuns the
instinct, so prevalent in the first, to “throw rocks”
at higher education, as one commissioner put it in
written comments to his colleagues. That doesn’t mean
the new report lets colleges off the hook or ignores
higher education’s real and serious problems; it just
does so in language that is more descriptive and less
inflamed."

Inside Higher Ed's story, dated July 17, can be
accessed at
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2006/07/17/commission ...

The next day Inside Higher Ed's reporter Doug
Lederman, who has been following the issue all year
long, did a reaction story noting that members of the
commission were all over the map.

He quoted David Ward, president of the American
Council on Education (which represents college
presidents), as saying the second draft showed
"improvements in both tone and content" over the
first. But Ward added it "omitted the preamble that
contained the harshest rhetoric of the first draft,
and since 'these introductory comments will set the
tone for the rest of the report ... I am very anxious
to see what changes will be made in this area.'"

Lederman also quoted American Council of Trustees and
Alumni president Ann Neal as saying the second draft
dropped earlier criticism of "important curricular
issues - and their connection to the serious cultural
illiteracy that the commission recognizes." And
Richard Vedder, an adjunct scholar for a politically
conservative think tank, worried that "as we move to
maximize support within the commission [by toning down
the rhetoric], we run risk of making it more of a
pablum, inoffensive document that says relatively
little."

Lederman's headline, "Too Much Change, or Not
Enough?," catches the tone of things. His report is
available at
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2006/07/18/commission

Media reaction to the draft, as with the commission's
other deliberations, ranged from muted to nonexistent.
But there were signs the political posturing isn't
quite over.

Writing on a blog titled "Phi Beta Cons: The *Right*
Take on Higher Ed" in the online edition of William
Buckley's National Review magazine, Candace de Russy
said "this draft’s regrettable dropping of focus on
declining undergraduate education should not surprise
us. There are too many higher education insiders
serving on the commission, and it is not in their
self-interest to demand serious curricular reform and
an end to grade inflation as well as to show
open-mindedness to innovative means for delivering
higher education."

She added, "Thus it’s the commission itself that ought
to be gutted and re-constituted with members with
(pardon the expression) real guts. Barring that, it is
likely that this entire exercise will in the end do
little or nothing to ameliorate higher education."

The permalink to de Russy's blog entry is http://phibetacons.nationalreview.com/post/?q=Zjk5NmQ0Yjc3YjJjMzU2MWQ3NjI5MzVlN2U4OThmMzg=

Also reacting to the new draft in the National
Review's higher ed blog was Charles Mitchell, program
director at the American Council of Trustees and
Alumni. He quoted ACTA president Neal's July 18
statement to Higher Ed Today: "In a time of global
competition and conflict, transparency and assessments
don’t matter if the product is not worthy. ... Access
and completion rates are simply irrelevant if the
education received is incoherent and fails to
guarantee the common ground of training and outlook on
which our society depends. Yet the commission remains
silent on these critical points."

Mitchell added, I think with good reason, "There is
certainly much more to come on this story."

Mitchell's permalink is http://phibetacons.nationalreview.com/post/?q=Nzg0ZmFiNmI3NzVlMTFkNDY3YzUzYWIyMDY0NWFlNzE=

National standardized testing

In the meantime, ETS has released a report calling for
"a broad national system to better understand student
learning in two- and four-year colleges and
universities." To do that, ETS specifically recommends
"a systematic, data-driven, comprehensive approach to
measuring student learning with direct, valid and
reliable measures."

The ETS report is titled "A Culture of Evidence:
Postsecondary Assessment and Learning Outcomes." It
notes the federal commission's deliberations and
recommends that the regional accrediting associations
develop a national plan for testing on "four
dimensions of student learning":

-- workplace readiness and general skills
-- domain-specific knowledge and skills
-- soft skills such as teamwork, communications and
creativity
-- student engagement with learning.

"Colleges and universities face continued pressure to
prove their effectiveness in an increasingly difficult
fiscal environment," said Mari Pearlman, Senior Vice
President of Higher Education at ETS, in a press
release posted to the MarketWire public relations
service. "We hope this paper will further the
discussion about how our system of higher education
might respond to this challenge."

The ETS press release, which contains a link to the
report in PDF format, is available at http://www.marketwire.com/mw/release_html_b1?release_id=145859 ...

I hope I don't sound cynical if I note that ETS
(originally known as the Educational Testing Service)
is a leader in the standardized test business. Its
products include the SAT, the GRE, the TOEFL and high
school advanced placement tests.

-- Pete Ellertsen is chairman of SCI's assessment
committee and editor of Nuts & Bolts.

Is this what the future looks like?

2006-07-19T19:59:00.000-05:00

Proof, as if it were needed, that ideology has nothing to do with political meddling in the classroom comes today from Great Britain. It came in the form of a news report in The Guardian of a House of Commons committee hearing. Testifying was Alan Johnson, education secretary in Britain's Labour Party government. He defended the emphasis on standardized testing imposed by Labour's Office for Standards in Education ("Ofsted" for short). The Guardian reports:

Speaking to the House of Commons education select committee, Mr Johnson said staff at a school in Nottingham had told him recently that they would like to see league tables [ranking schools by test scores] scrapped.

"I accept the pressure it puts, and the extra intensity and stress it puts on teachers, but it's absolutely the right thing to do," he said.

Mr Johnson gave his backing to "the whole kit and caboodle" of accountability for schools - from Ofsted inspections to national tests and exams and league tables.

He added: "If anything, we need to intensify that rather than relax."

Mr Johnson said it was "fundamental" that children should leave primary school with a mastery of reading and maths.

Sound familiar?

Under Prime Minister Tony Blair, Labour has won elections since the late 1990s with a "New Labour" set of moderately liberal policies similar to former U.S. President Bill Clinton's. School reform; "league tables," well publicized lists of schools' aggragate test scores; and pressure on classroom teachers to raise test scores is part of the "whole kit and caboodle" New Labour offers to the voters. It sounds more than a little bit like our No Child Left Behind regimen of mandatory testing and ranking of schools by aggragate test scores, doesn't it?

British educators, like the teachers in Nottingham or Harvey Goldstein of the Institute of Education in London, argue the league tables can't help but measure factors like "sex, ethnic origin and social class background" that the schools can't be held responsible for.

Sometimes we tie the failure of NCLB to President Bush and the Republican Congress, but we forget the NCLB bill was co-sponsored by Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., and passed Congress with broad bipartisan support. Again, the similarity between Ofsted's accountability measures and NCLB is striking.

If anything, the British system is more hostile to good classroom teaching than our own. And it's good politics. At today's committee hearing, Johnson was kidded about his political ambitions. Here's how the exchange went:

The Conservative MP for Reading East, Rob Wilson, told Mr Johnson he had "a few quid" on the outcome.

Mr Wilson asked: "When Tony Blair steps down next year and you take over as prime minister will your priority be, as his was, 'education, education, education'?"

The Labour chairman of the committee, Barry Sheerman, suggested at this point that the minister might like to restrict his answer to education policy.

In response to Mr Wilson's question, Mr Johnson said: "Yes. I would probably classify it as 'learning, learning, learning', but it's the same thing."

And I would classify it as politics, politics, politics. Unfortunately, bashing classroom teachers looks like good politics on both sides of the water.

Resources on Native music

2006-07-05T19:33:00.000-05:00

Cross-posted to music and teaching blogs for potential use in HUM 221 (Native American cultures) in the spring of 2007.

A valuable article in the Jan.-Feb. 2003 issue of Sharing Our Pathways, newsletter of the Alaska Rural Systemic Initiative at UA-Fairbanks. It's by Vivian Martindale, and it's titled "Native American Songs as Literature." In addition to an ANKN (Alaska Native Knowledge Netword) article on the Athabascan peoples, it mentions Joy Harjo, Canyon Records and other resources on Native cultures in the lower 48.

Says Martindale:

Classrooms don't have to be boring. Literature classes especially can be enhanced through the medium of song. In David Leedom Shaul's article "A Hopi Song-Poem in Context", he claims that the listener is similar to an audience during storytelling, in that the listener is also interacting with the music. The listener, as a participant, is not passive; the listener is hearing rhythms, words, patterns and much more. The listener does not have to understand the Native language in order to appreciate the song. Shaul calls attention to the genre called "song poems." These songs are in a category by themselves, separate from poetry and prose. "The text of song-poems in Hopi culture, like much poetry, seemingly create their own context by virtue of minimalist language" (Shaul 1992:230Ð31). Therefore it would be interesting to include the concept of song poems or poetry as music into a curriculum.

She quotes this from a Joy Harjo/Poetic Justice song called "My House is the Red Earth." (Poetic Justice is Harjo's band.):

My house is the red earth. It could be the center of the world. I've heard New York, Tokyo or Paris called the center of the world, but I say it is magnificently humble. You could drive by and miss it. Radio waves can obscure it. Words cannot construct it for there are some sounds left to sacred wordless form. For instance, that fool crow picking through trash near the corral, understands the center of the world as greasy scraps of fat. Just ask him. He doesn't have to say that the earth has turned scarlet through fierce belief, after centuries of heartbreak and laughter.

She also has tips and caveats on teaching traditional Native American music.

The Chronicle's take on Miller commission

2006-07-04T11:14:00.000-05:00

Since The Chronicle of Higher Education usually hides its articles behind a subscription firewall, I haven't kept up with its coverage of the U.S. Education Department's blue-ribbon Commission on the Future of Higher Education. But every so often The Chronicle comes out from behind the firewall, and this week they've got a good takeout on the commission's draft report from the July 7 issue. Like practically everything else in The Chronicle, it's thorough and very well balanced.

Written by Kelly Field, the article catches the tone of the Commission's debate in the headline: "Draft Report From Federal Panel Takes Aim at Academe." A subhead notes the split between chairman Charles Miller and educators on the commission. It also details some of the substantive recommendations that have surfaced thus far:

A draft report released last week by the Commission on the Future of Higher Education called for overhauling the federal student-aid and accreditation systems, easing the process of transferring credits between institutions, and using testing to measure the "value added" by a college education.

The report, which the panel discussed during a closed meeting two days after it was released, also endorsed the creation of a national "unit record" system to track the educational progress of every college student in the United States.

With that on the record, Field goes on to sketch in the controversy on the commission over the tone of its deliberations. Some of the complaints are procedural, reflecting concern that the commission will railroad through a predetermined set of recommendations. Field says:

... several commission members were unhappy with both the substance and the tone of the preliminary report, which was written by an outside writer with assistance from commission staff members. Some said it favored the views of the consultants who drafted the commission's issue papers over the opinions of the commissioners themselves.

"This really reflects what the consultants put in the papers and what they would like the commission to say," said James J. Duderstadt, president emeritus of the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. "It doesn't have any relationship to the kind of deliberations we had at the May meeting," when members began sifting through potential recommendations in an effort to reach an initial consensus.

David Ward, president of the American Council on Education, said the report was "based on a highly selective reading of testimony" and "in no way reflects the candid and creative discussions we have had during our yearlong process."

"I believe it is seriously flawed and needs significant revision," he wrote in a letter to college presidents.

On the other side of the issue, Field quoted Richard K. Vedder, an economist who writes for the right-wing American Enterprise Institute, who said the report represented "a good starting point," and Sara Martinez Tucker, president and chief executive of the Hispanic Scholarship Fund, who said she was "very pleased with the completeness of it." Field explains:

Ms. Tucker said she created a matrix of all the ideas that came out of the commission's task forces, cross-referenced it against the report, and found that only three of her colleagues' suggestions were missing.

"Some of the ideas may be buried, or not as prominent as people would want, but they're in there. You just have to look," she said, noting that the unit-record proposal — her No. 2 priority — is not mentioned until Page 22 of the 27-page report.

Still, there's this question of tone. It's dogged the Commission since day one, and it won't go away. Field reports:

Other panel members were troubled by the tone of the report, which began by noting that American higher education "has become one of our greatest success stories," but quickly turned to "the less inspiring realities of college life in our nation": the enrollment gap between rich and poor, the high use of remedial courses, rising costs, and a failure to prepare American workers for a changing global economy.

The report went on to describe colleges as "risk-averse, frequently self-satisfied, and unduly expensive," and blamed rising tuitions on colleges' "failure to seek institutional efficiencies and by their disregard for improving productivity."

Robert W. Mendenhall, president of Western Governors University, an online, nonprofit institution, called the report "overly negative and overly focused on the academy as the culprit." And Ms. Tucker said she worried that the report's get-tough tone could backfire, alienating, rather than engaging and inspiring, academe.

Mr. Miller defended the draft, noting that Secretary Spellings had called on the commission not to be "shy or mealy-mouthed." In an interview, he said panel members' repeated calls for "moderate" language have left him feeling "almost like I'm being censored."

Mr. Miller also stood by his decision to have the panel's outside writer produce a complete draft, rather than an outline or set of recommendations, as was initially planned. Several panel members who received the full report a week before it was released to the public said they had been surprised by the abrupt change in plans.

He called the idea of offering recommendations before documenting the problem "an Alice in Wonderland idea: 'answers first, questions later.'"

"My way is the honest way, the direct way," he said.

Note Miller's language. His way is not an honest way, it's the honest way, implying all other ways are something other than honest. Perhaps it's just a chance turn of phrase. Or perhaps Miller's tone is hostile and combative.

Field's article ends with a valuable list of specific recommendations so far on issues of Access; Affordability; Quality and Innovation; and Accountability (with its recommendations on who carry them out listed in parentheses). I'll quote the recommendations on accountabilty below:

Require institutions to measure student learning using measures such as the National Survey of Student Engagement and the Community College Survey of Student Engagement, as well as the Collegiate Learning Assessment and the Measure of Academic Proficiency and Progress (states). Provide incentives for states, higher-education associations, systems, and institutions to develop outcomes-focused accountability systems (federal government).
Make results of such measures available to students and report them publicly in the aggregate. They should also be included on transcripts and in national databases of accountability data. Institutions should make aggregate results publicly available in a consumer-friendly form.
Administer the National Assessment of Adult Literacy every five years, instead of 10 (Education Department).
Require the National Center for Education Statistics to prepare timely annual public reports on college revenue and expenditures, including analysis of the major changes from year to year, at the sector and state levels (secretary of education).
Develop a national student unit-record tracking system to follow the progress of each student in the country, with appropriate privacy safeguards.
Create a consumer-friendly information database on higher education that includes a search engine that allows parents, policy makers, and others to weigh and rank institutions based on variables of their choosing (Department of Education).
Establish a national accreditation framework that contains a set of comparable performance measures on learning outcomes appropriate to degree levels and institutional missions, and that is suitable for accreditation, public reporting, and consumer profiles; that does not prescribe specific input and process standards; and that requires institutions to report progress relative to their national and international peers.
Make accreditation more transparent. Make the findings of reviews easily accessible to the public, and increase the proportion of public representatives in the governance of accrediting organizations and members of review teams from outside higher education.

Footnote. The Chronicle does have posted to the World Wide Web a directory of stories it has written on the Miller commission. And we take The Chronicle at SCI's Becker Library. So if you want to read them in hard copy, you can print out the directory and take it to the library.

Snake oil and 'Texas-syle accountability'

2006-07-01T15:17:00.000-05:00

I'm cross-posting this item to my blogs on newspapering and education, for reasons that should be obvious as we go along.

Are we seeing the beginning of an orchestrated effort to discredit American colleges and universities? After months of being mostly ignored by the news media, Charles Miller, the chairman of a blue-ribbon federal Commission on the Future of Higher Education gives an interview to his home-town paper. He blasts higher ed, and he blasts the members of his commission who dispute his rhetoric. Staff writer Ralph K.M. Haurwitz of The Austin (Tex.) American-Statesman reports in Friday's paper:

Charles Miller expected a fight from higher education administrators when he agreed to head a national panel for his old friend, Margaret Spellings, the U.S. secretary of education. He's getting one.

The Commission on the Future of Higher Education issued a draft report this week recommending academic and fiscal reforms. Some higher education leaders, including a few on the commission, have criticized the draft as overly harsh in tone and too quick to condemn academia.

Miller, speaking from Houston on Thursday, a day after the commission met to review the draft, didn't sound like someone interested in backing down on substance and perhaps not too much on tone.

"I've been advised to say things in moderate terms, to not criticize the academy," Miller said, declining to say who offered such advice. "It's almost like being censored. Some of the language ... could be toned down, but the real issue is putting responsibility on the higher education system for things it's not doing well. It has some really bad flaws."

The headline catches the tone of Miller's remarks: "Chairman defends panel's call for reforms in higher education." But his proposed reforms - which are not yet the commission's because they haven't been adopted yet - have been roundly questioned in The New York Times and a few papers like The Boston Globe in major metro areas where the commission has conducted hearings. (The Harvard Crimson, a student paper with an understandable ax to grind, has followed the commission more faithfully than any of the dailies.) So why does Miller answer his critics in a paper down in Texas and not The Times, The Globe, The Harvard Crimson or the papers that have covered the commission's debate? And why, for that matter, does The American-Statesman write up Miller's defense without interviewing his critics?

Now I'm going to assume The American-Statesman down in Austin got the story on its own. Miller is a former chairman of the University of Texas Board of Regents, and he might have mentioned it back home. Word might have gotten around town, and the paper might have decided to get to the bottom of it. Sometimes that's the way we got stories when I was on the courthouse beat. Of course Miller could have leaked it to a friendly paper, too, but I have no way of knowing that. So I won't speculate.

Miller's friend Margaret Spellings was in the news last week, too. At an international conference in Athens, Greece, she spoke on "higher education and the benefits of partnering with the private sector to prepare students for jobs in the 21st century." And by golly, she just happened to mention the Miller commission:

In launching this Higher Education Commission, we recognized that to remain a quality system we had to ask the tough questions and anticipate necessary changes that can and must be made if we are to have a robust system 50 years from now – especially as needs for all become greater.

As a nation, we spend more than $300 billion dollars a year on higher education – a third of which comes from the federal government. Yet, we have very little information on what we are getting in return for that investment. And what we do know is cause for action.

I can't find any evidence on the internet that the media picked up the story, but Secretary Spellings' remarks were helpfully posted on the U.S. Education Department website.

Miller noted the same statistical factoid in his interview. Here's how The American-Statesman reported his remark and put it in context:

The federal government covers a third of the nation's higher education spending but less than 10 percent of the K-12 investment. Yet the federal government exercises more control over primary and secondary education — through Texas-style accountability that Bush parlayed into a national policy — than it does over colleges and universities.

Miller, former head of the University of Texas System Board of Regents, said Thursday that he regards significant change as not only urgently needed but inevitable.

"If you have a very inefficient and very expensive enterprise, which higher education is now, and huge changes in technology and a cultural change in how people use this technology, that's almost a guarantee that some entity somewhere is going to develop a very effective way to deliver these skills at a much cheaper price," he said. "It could be in a country where they don't have a set of institutions to be angry about change.

"It'll have such demand that you'll have explosive growth that could sweep the higher education system like a tsunami. Supply creates a demand sometimes, not the other way around," Miller said, citing as an example the advent of personal computers and software to run them.

Miller said he knew from the start of the commission's work last year that some in higher education circles would be highly skeptical of his leanings. "I was from Texas and a businessman and worked on accountability and a Bush friend," he said. "I was in about the worst category you could be in."

On that note, the paper segued to Miller's recommendations: Streamling and increasing financial aid, better record keeping," encouraging "colleges and universities to develop new and better methods of controlling costs and improving productivity," and encouraging "states to require public colleges to measure student learning using tests, such as the Collegiate Learning Assessment, that examine critical thinking, reading, math and other skills."

All of this bears watching, but Miller's last points bear especially careful scrutiny. The membership of his commission is weighted toward industry and people with a vested interest in test prep and for-profit educational venures rather than academicians, and consistently he has touted one specific standardized testing product every time he mentions the subject of testing.

What it is that makes this old courthouse reporter think if Miller and his friends from Texas are peddling snake oil, and if they have their way, somebody, somewhere is going to make a big ole Texas-size pile of money as we move into the future of higher education?