more blog worship
I have to agree with Robert. I found the session frustrating because I know a little bit about blogs. I would have liked more on how we can actually use blogs for teaching. His blogvangelism brought out the curmudgeon in me: How can we accept that young people are so good at multitasking when I have trouble getting them to do any competent singletasking --y'know like reading a book, finding a thesis, constructing a coherent essay or grammatical sentence?
I don't quite agree with Robert about the history, however. While it is true that something resembling democracy only began to emerge in the Jacksonian era, newspapers and printing presses were significant factors in the revolutionary period. Thus, it is a least debatable that the Founding Fathers (or as I call them, the SCFF -- So-called Founding Fathers) would have supported today's proliferation of media voices.
And re: Robert's dismissal of the relevance of Middlebury to our experience because of its "tons of money": I seem to remember, before I came to WPU, the tv commercials that touted the university's wonderful tech capability -- take courses in your pajamas!
... just having fun picking up on Robert's contrarian start to our experiment ...
dewar
posted by dewar macleod @ 6:41 AM
3 comments
3 Comments:
I agree that basic =blog= stuff would have been interesting and beneficial to a crowd w/ little understanding of the concept BUT that's not what I objected to. My concern was all the time se spent telling us that it's a new world and that our students think differently than we do, yada yada, which is NOT new to anyone!
Hilary, I'm afrad I'm going to have to be the contrarian again. The extent to which Elizabethan English was presenrved in the hollows and mountains of Appalachia has been exaggerated. Although some phrases and pronounciations of 17th C. English could be found in Applacia even 50 years ago the speech of Kentucky hillbillies in 1900 would not have been recognized by their English forebears. One reason this myth persists is that some English folklife continues to be practiced in Appalachia. That too is exagerated. One folk collector of the 1930s took in Aunt Molly Jackson when she was driven out of Harlan county for her labor activity in 1931. She lived in his house while he recorded her songs and stories. At once point he was shocked to find that the knew the Robin Hood cycle =exactly= the way it was written down in 18th C. England.
He wrote many papers on this and other songs/stories she knew from the period and came to the conclusion that Elizabethan folklife was preserved in Appalachia.
But in the 1950s shipwright-turned-folklorist Archie Green interviewed Aunt Molly in the closing years of her life and found something even more astonishing: while staying at the folklorists house Jackson came across these Elizabethan songs/stories and she memorized first the Robin Hood cycle and repeated it back to the historian as though she'd brought it from Kenutcky. He made such a fuss over it she went back and memorized the rest, spitting them back to him in order to make him happy. He never found out that he'd been duped, and the myth of the persistance of Elizabethan folklife in KY persisted.
See:
Green, Archie. "Aunt Molly Jackson and Robin Hood: A Study in Folk Re-creation." Journal of American Folklore 69, 1956: 23-38.
Robert
Did you ever read the Harlan Ellison story about aborted (and flushed) fetuses using the flushed alligators as steeds in a takeover of the city?
I mean, that is one really bent guy. My friend Jack Dann knows Harlan and says he's a normal kind of a guy, but I don't believe it.
RAH
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