Blogs

One of the major themes in our class discussions and readings thus far is that the concept of originality is bogus.  Everything we write, say, experiment, and do is just some iteration of what has come before.  I’ve been convinced.  In another one of my classes this week, a professor mentioned the idea of “evolutionary tinkering.”  Here’s a definition written by Francois Jacob posted on Larry Moran’s blog Sandwalk: Strolling with a Skeptical Biochemist:

Chimamanda Adiche’s talk “The Danger of a Single Story” spoke to the discomfort I have recently wrestled with in terms of my own upbringing as a middle-class, white girl; my battle to acknowledge the single story the media, my teachers, our government, religion and so many other facets of my life have taught me unintentionally. Whether it be on a global scale such as Adiche’s experience with expectations of a single African story and the token “third-world woman” too often noted by anthropologists or at the local level, one school to the next, via class or color, the single story does exist and is used to create structural barriers, while simultaneously allowing those in power to happily claim moral neutrality at the hands of a biased system. Lemke’s reading spoke to this juxtaposition, showing how language standardization has been assumed both necessary and desirable, creating a means to attain and justify power that is neither fair nor essential: “The policy of language standardization seems culturally and politically neutral only if we deny that differences in linguistic codes have evolved to reflect differences in the lifeways, social practices, and interests of different communities and social groups” (Lemke, 2). Lemke’s point here and throughout the article is critical, acknowledging that an emphasis on written standard English, a strain that is not spoken or used by anyone, creates a divide and gives an unfair advantage to those whose dialect is closest to the written word—typically those already in power.

Hi all :)

I was thinking about the question asked during the class today. "Would Virginia Woolf encourage you to go to Bryn Mawr?"

My answer is no. I think she will not because of various reasons that I will not list here but save them for class discussion later.

Anyways, to see what other people think of women's colleges, I put "why women's college?" on the search bar and read some articles about it.

http://www.boston.com/news/education/higher/articles/2007/05/21/why_we_need_womens_colleges/

This is an article written by the president of Mount Holyoke College in 2007. She mentions Virginia Woolf (for a sentence) and the article is about women's colleges. So I thought it was pretty relevant to us!

Good night!

a digital humanities talk on Thursday!

"Geography and the Humanities: Applications of Digital Cartography to Digital Humanities"

Presented by Robert Cheetham & Deb Bover of Azavea

Location: Haverford College -Magill Library -Philips Wing

Date: January 26, 2012

Time: Tea-4:15pm | Talk- 4:30pm

Please see the poster attached for more info.

Since you'll be writing your first on-line papers next week (perhaps about Three Guineas?), I thought you might like to have a look @ two blog postings about the text, written by a BMC Comp Lit major as part of a reading blog she kept this past summer. It may open up some possibilities for you, about writing in public.....See
Arthur's Education Fund: Seeing the Public from the Private, and
The Worth of Three Guineas: Opening UP the Text, Part I.

Several people have noticed, and I am feeling it myself as well, that it can be challenging to follow particular conversations within our #BMCed250 hashtag on Twitter.  When Twitter hashtags are used at discrete real-time events (like in-class, at conferences, the scheduled #edchat, etc.) conversations are easier to follow because all the participants are attending to the Tweets at the same time.  With our class we're using the #BMCed250 hashtag to converse over a longer span of time and asynchronously (without all necessarily seeing all the tweets simultaneously), so particular conversations within the hashtag are a little more difficult to manage.

Anyway, here are a few tools/techniques I found that might help you sort it all out if you are finding things chaotic:

Within Twitter

https://support.twitter.com/articles/20169582-what-s-where-in-twitter-s-new-design#conversations

I felt that the idea of plagiarism is presented as a hipocrasy in "The ecstasy of influence: A plagiarism" by Jonathon Lethem.  Lethem expresses that  it doesn't make sense that artists have come to resent those who plagiarize - those who love the author's work enough to adopt it, maybe change it and bring it into their own work.  His reference to the Velveteen Rabbit makes a good analogy.  The rabbit in the story is told that when a child REALLY loves him, he will become Real.  A horse tells the rabbit, "Generally by the time you become Real, your hair has worn off and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby.” Then Lethem comments, "Seen from the perspective of the toymaker, the Velveteen Rabbit's loose joints and missing eyes represent vandalism, signs of misuse and rough treatment; for others, these are marks of its loving use" (Lethem 16).  The rabbit is clearly the piece of writing and the toymaker is the author.  The point is that it is the toymaker's job to build toys for enjoyment, right?  What child sits a toy on his shelf to look at for pleasure?  None. The child plays with the toy every day, takes the toy to sleepovers, restaurants, the movies, misplaces it and makes his father turn the house upside down looking for it, cries when his mom wants to wash it, and never wants to give the toy up even long after he has outgrown it.  Isn't that what authors are supposed to want for their piece of writing?

In high school, I didn’t have to write that much or that well.  I knew that the transition from high school to college-level writing would be hard and my fear about  the switch pushed me toward the natural sciences.  The first few science classes I took in college were happily writing free, but now that I’ve moved into higher level courses, I’ve had to learn the rules for writing in science.  

Just to follow up on some of the posts here and on Twitter about music as a form of literacy... here are some references that might be of interest to anyone who plans to write on this topic in future.

If you missed my Tweet this weekend, I posted a link to an All Things Considered interview with the director of a new independent film featuring the music of the Bayaka pygmies:  http://n.pr/wmrAhh

The film, Oka!, is a fictionalized account of ethnomusicologist Louis Sarno's experience living with the Bayaka, who create music ingeniously from all sorts of objects. Certainly we should be wary of the film's old familiar theme: "...man from economically developed, formerly known as civilized world, goes off to live and find meaning in traditional, formerly known as primitive society...", as well as the idea that any society is more "ancient" or "pristine" than any other... but, still the film looks interesting or at least fun and the library will acquire it when it comes out on DVD.  Here's a link to the trailer:  http://imdb.to/y5r16G