Well, moving over, anyway.
This is probably the very last post you'll ever see here. I'll leave the site up for a while, until I decide what exactly to do with it, but I'm going to give version 2.0 of my blog a try, and I've chosen a new platform and a new host. My new space is at http://www.cgbrooke.net, and you'll want to update any blogroll links and/or feeds that still may be floating around out there.
thanks.
If my MT interface is to be believed, this would be my 1000th blog entry. I am only a little stunned by this fact, although it makes sense, considering that I've been at this for almost four and a half years now. This is the final roman numeral milestone, and so I offer three forms of celebration, in likely order of their achievement:
First, I present to you similarly roman numeralled entries, bolded for your clicking convenience: D C L X V I
I'm warning you now: it's a motley bunch of posts.
Celebration #2 is that I'm going to finally upgrade here to MT4, and I'm hoping that a new suite of antisp4m will cut down on the crap round these parts. I had to clear out close to 600 junk comments this weekend, and it's catching legitimate comments from new folk way too often. Maybe I'll slap a captcha on there too. Anyway, that's coming soon.
And coming a little later is a redesign. I need to redesign the CCCOA too, and that has priority, so it may not be until later in the semester. But look for that...
Wow. 1000 entries. Mmmmmm good. That's all.
Okay. Don't blame me if this wasn't worth the wait.
I'm subbed to the ACRLog, and this came across the other day, a piece by "StevenB" about Why Students Want Simplicity And Why It Fails Them When It Comes To Research. The question of how to move students from "I'll just Google it" to a more nuanced, complex understanding both of research and of how to go about doing research is a topic near and dear to my heart. So I read with interest.
Two tangents. First, in the piece itself focuses on simplicity and complexity when it comes to research:
A defining quality of a complex problem is that right answers are not easily obtainable. Excepting those students who are passionate about the study matter and research project, most students would prefer to simplify their research as much as possible. The problem, as a new article points out, is that applying simple problem solving approaches to complex problems is a contextual error that will lead to failure.
For a long time, as I was working on my book manuscript, I had in mind something that I called my secret 6th chapter, the first 5 being revisions of the classical canons of rhetoric (and all beginning with the letter P, but that's even more tangential). The 6th chapter was going to be an exploration of another P word: plectics. I mistakenly believed that the word was mine all mine. Yeah, not so much. But anyhow, I'd planned on talking about how plectics might give us a spectrum along which to locate texts without recourse to the print/screen distinction. I've always been a fan of Deleuze's The Fold, and I'd never been happy with the assumption that even the most intricate and complicated print texts were simply linear compared with digital texts.
But alas, such a chapter was not to be. And that's the end of the first tangent.
Tangent #2 is a little shorter, and the reference in my title. StevenB draws on something called "Cynefin," which according to Wikipedia is a concept from Welsh:
The name Cynefin is a Welsh word which is commonly translated into English as 'habitat' or 'place', although that fails to convey the full meaning. A fuller translation would be that it convey the sense that we all have multiple pasts of which we are only partly aware: cultural, religious, geographic, tribal etc. The multiple elements of this definition and the inherent uncertainty implied were the reasons for the selection of the name.The name seeks to remind us that all human interactions are strongly influenced and frequently determined by our experiences, both through the direct influence of personal experience, and through collective experience, such as stories or music.
What's really interesting to me here is the parallel between Cynefin and ethos, specifically as it's defined as "haunt" as both a location and something that affects us. It reminds me a little of Diane's writing--here's a little taste of "Finitude’s Clamor; Or, Notes toward a Communitarian Literacy" from CCC, for example:
You (writing-being) are a limit-cruiser, so even when you’re alone, you are not alone. You are (already) heavily populated with encounters, with others whom you have welcomed and who continue to work you over—to live on in you, haunting you and making demands of you—even in your solitude.
Someone with more experience than I in Wales will have to decide how many times removed cynefin is from ethos, but they sure sound related.
What's uninteresting to me about cynefin is its appropriation for the system that apparently bears its name. Maybe I need to do some background reading, but I have a tough time understanding how the term itself translates into a "decision-making framework" other than to serve as a reminder that not everything can be reduced to conscious decision-making frameworks. But oh well.
Back (finally!) to the entry itself. StevenB restricts himself in his discussion to 2 of the 5 "domains," simplicity and complexity, which runs the danger, it seems to me, of inscribing a binary between them. One of the things that I think we try to get at with the notion of inquiry is the habit of allowing "simple" to become "complex" through what this framework calls "emergent practices" (and perhaps even complicated). The ability to take complex questions and to simplify them is (to my mind) the difference that turns research into research writing.
But neither of these moves, simple->complex or complex->simple, is (a) easy, (b) frictionless, or (c) naturally acquired through osmosis. StevenB's suggestion is
that we add “identify and understand the context of the research problem and choose a decision-making style that matches that context� to that long list of information literacy skills that many of us list in some planning document.
And that's all well and good. But I guess I feel like that just identifies what is for many of us (and I presume, our students) the black box of academic research. I can come up with 407 examples of good writers (and designers) taking complicated questions, issues, and ideas, and helping to return them to simplicity (which is one effect of much writing that is good), but examples of moving in the other direction are few, in part because we tend to box up that part of things ourselves. And part of that is because, in academic prose, making the complex simple is one of the few near-universal justifications for the work that we do. Figuring out and articulating how we arrive at those complex problems is one of the things that a course focused on research writing could usefully accomplish.
That's all.
I started the week with an idea for an entry, but not really the time to deploy it.
And as the week has progressed, ideas have come at me from all directions, but I've held back, waiting for the time to draft my early-week idea.
But now, I think I've mostly forgotten the original idea. Maybe I'll have a little time tonight to reconstruct it. Here's a tease: it's tangentially about the possibility of Welsh rhetoric.
More anon.
It was not a pretty game by any measure, save perhaps for the Giants' defensive linemen's performance. But I'll say this for Super Bowl XLII: I was on the edge of the couch for most of the 4th quarter, and the game was a live one until the second-to-last tick of the clock.
Once again, I don't think that a Manning deserved to win the MVP. My MVP? Syracuse University's own David Tyree, who:
I am a little sorry that Merc won't have any company in Perfectville, and I'm even more sorry that Junior Seau didn't get a ring, but it's hard to feel sorry watching the SuperPats catch an elbow to the chops like that.
That's all. See you in the autumn, NFL.
1. Mercury Morris vanishes, maybe forever
2. No more tv/radio spots talking about the Super Bowl without being allowed (I guess) to use the actual phrase Super Bowl™
3. 359 sweet, sweet days until the next Super Bowl Media Monday, where all the B-list media outlets compete with one another to be the most "viral." This year? Congratulations to TV Azteca for being the biggest jackasses of a pretty jackassy bunch
4. No more wondering why the hell the freakin SUPER BOWL needs (a) a red carpet, or (b) Ryan Seacrest to stand on it. I know that FOX is the king of irrelevant and intrusive cross-product advertisement, but isn't American Idol already the most popular show on TV?
5. Hey, those wacky! crazy! Super Bowl commercials!
Last year at this time, I cared, since my Bars made it to the Super Bowl for the first time since I was in high school. But as a result, I think I'm even more cynical this year about how shallow and vapid these 2 weeks leading up to the game actually are. I just have no patience for the fifteenth story about the point spread moving from 13 to 12.5, or Tom Brady's phantom sprain, or Eli Manning's magical transformation from schlub to star in 3-4 games, or worst of all, stories about the repetitiveness of the stories. Ugh. Play the damn game already.
That's all.
The subtitle for this entry could easily be Holiday Loot, Part 3. One of the best gifts I got this holiday was a framed version of the picture above, which features me, resplendent in blue, sitting on my grandfather J.O.'s lap, being poked in the face by my dad, and looking at a photo of my great grandfather Collin, for whom I was named. J.O. passed away while I was still wearing onesies, so I don't really remember him at all. I'm not 100% sure when the picture was taken, although it would have to be either late 1969 or early 1970, which would put my dad at around 26 or 27 in the picture. And I consider this incontrovertible proof that short hair is actually genetic in my family. That, and baby-poking.
Anyhow, today would have been my dad's 65th birthday, so you'll forgive a little nostalgia on my part. That's all.
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