Since my last post I’ve banged through two excellent collections published by the MacArthur Foundation for Digital Media and Learning, specifically The Ecology of Games: Connecting Youth, Games, and Learning and Digital Youth, Innovation, and the Unexpected. Those links take you to the publications’ home pages, but you can access the content for FREE by clicking on “Open Access Edition” under the menu heading for Related Links. Lots of great stuff in both of them.

I’m hopefully finishing Henry Jenkins’ Convergence Culture: Where the Old Media and New Media Collide later today. I’m desperately trying to wrap up this area for my preliminary exams so I can move on to the rest of criticism in the other two areas. It’s a bit like the Dutch boy trying to plug the holes in the dam while trying to drink from a fire hose, to mix metaphors. Most importantly, I think I can spin the issue of digital classrooms and creative writing into a number of research projects, conference papers, and articles in the coming years. There’s a lot to sink my teeth into and the issue is sparsely covered. After a dalliance with hypertext during the late 90’s and early 2000’s, digital media and creative writing seem to have gone on separate paths. I’m coming up with a crazy-large idea that would involve using gaming to shed light on common creative writing principles, using fan fiction as a way to motivate students to write in more familiar genres, and using wikis to compose and publish collaborative multimedia works of fiction for public consumption on the Internet. Wish me luck.

Ah, football. Hardly have time to watch review shows much less the matches themselves but things are really tight all over Europe. Real Madrid is on top of Barcelona on goal differential, yet no one can quite figure out how that happened since Real have been stop-and-start all season, while Barcelona have been the model of efficiency and consistency. In short, too many draws have done in Barca, who are clearly tiring, while it appears as though Madrid might be finding a groove. A very interesting last third of the season indeed.

The same goes for England. What stands out to me this season is that none of the big four teams are all that good, and neither are the teams a tier below them (e.g. Tottenham, Villa, Citeh, Everton). Man Ure and Chelski look positively unstable and at this stage you’d have to think Ars*nal have as good of a shot as anybody. Readers of this space know I despise Ars*nal, and I get quite sick of their fans and their “In Whinger We Trust” sycophantic fawning. Despite my extreme dislike, I have to hand it to them for still being in the thick of things, yet a criticism is not far behind. Had the Whinger improved his squad even just a little buy purchasing a decent keeper and a holding midfielder, it’s quite likely that his squad could be comfortably challenging on multiple fronts at this stage, injuries and all. As it stands, they’re still a longish shot for the title and you can’t see them making it to the Champions League final, much less winning it. If I was an Ars*nal fan (and thank God I’m not) I would rue missing what’s turning out to be a huge opportunity rather than singing praises about my stubborn manager who failed to buy when a) he had the money, and b) had the need.

I’m not a fan of the powers that be stretching the Champions League Round of 16 over so many weeks, but I have to say every tie is an interesting story waiting to happen. Can’t wait to see how it all pans out. Via match reports of course…

Current Mood: Back to Reading and Baby Watching |
Currently Listening To – Uncle Tupelo – “Still Feel Gone”

I’m particularly interested in this genre due to Brian McHale’s concept that modernist fiction is like a detective novel, whereas postmodern fiction is like a science fiction novel. The former is rooted in epistemology (questions of knowing) whereas the latter deal with ontology (questions of being). This table does a pretty good job parsing out other areas that tend to define modernism and postmodernism.

The Sign of the Four would be a perfect book to use for teaching. Published in 1890, it really exemplifies the shift from the Romantic era (as embodied by Watson, who is ever-emotional) to modernism (as embodied by Holmes’ unwavering faith in reason and logic). There is a ton of other great stuff to mine, including colonialism (the back story happens in India and many servants are Indian), issues of class (Holmes employs “street Arab” boys to do intelligence work; the gentlemen Holmes and Watson regularly comment on the labor class, to name just a few), and gender (Watson’s courtship and interactions with Mary Morstan). Also, I like the fact that Doyle wrote these stories for the masses, even if they only would have found their way into the hands of the literate class. I think it would be a lot of fun to read in a group and talk about all of the above.

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I’m also getting close to finishing my reading for the “digital pedagogy” area for my prelims and I’m really enjoying what I’ve read thus far. I am inclined to agree with most of what I read, but the major challenge is that to fully incorporate technology into the classroom even (especially?) at the college level, the ways we thinking about what it means to teach and learn need to radically change. And of course, radical change is always a hard sell.

My personal (and professional) goal is to make some of this theory applicable to teaching creative writing. Both rhet/comp and professional writing seem to be asking interesting questions about incorporating technology into the classroom, yet it’s difficult to find much from the field of creative writing. What I have found tends to suggest using blogs and wikis to facilitate critiques, yet many digital pedagogy scholars would say these are the kinds of baby steps merely use the tools of technology while holding on to fixed notions of learning. Basically, you’re doing the same old workshop type stuff, only you cut out the paper.

James Paul Gee’s What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy and Good Video Games and Good Learning lay out a strong case for how educators need to consider how we can use games and game-like strategies to teach better. Gee does not say, as some Amazon reviews suggest, that we need to be incorporating video games into our classrooms; although he isn’t against it either, since many good video games have content well worth talking about in an academic or intellectual setting.

This has started me thinking about creative writing pedagogy and whether a good video game could help teach students about the choices an author makes when writing a narrative. I’ve been playing Fallout 3 over the last day or so, and it bears many of the hallmarks of Gee’s “good” video games, and I’m impressed with how the story and its world are inseparable. Before the game starts you hear the wasteland is dangerous and so it is; because the game is a sandbox (a non-linear story taking place in a large, explorable virtual world) you find out first-hand just how deadly it is by dying over, and over, and over again. You, as the character, have a limitless number of options before you; yet in reality, the nature of the world drastically limits your options to a mere handful due to your lack of equipment and resources, and you learn very quickly that you need to adapt your behavior in order to survive.

For me, this ties back very neatly to creative writing. Many, many times I see student stories where they want to portray a world as stark and deadly as the one in Fallout 3, yet the character traipses around as s/he sees fit without any negative consequences. Likewise, characters very often look, think, and act like they were 21st-century Midwesterners rather than looking, thinking, and acting like they were the last pocket of survivors of a nuclear holocaust. Characters often tend to be without a personal history, and little thought has been given to the multitude of attributes that make a character unique and well-rounded.

Part of me wonders how much this has to do with most students not being experienced fiction readers. Another part of me wonders if students fail to fully identify with characters in print fiction. And yet a third part of me wonders if this could be a situation where one of Gee’s “good” video games could help in a classroom setting. In games like Fallout 3 (and others), players have to customize their characters from the onset, so they do certain things better than others. Part of this selection reveals value judgments; would I rather have my character be good with small guns, or medicine and healing? These early choices make a big difference as the game progresses, and players are stuck with those attributes for good or bad, at least in the short term. These attributes also shape how players have to deal with various situations, and how in-game characters treat them.

In other words, good video games immerse players in an invented world, which is of course what good fiction writers do to their readers as well. The big difference is that players experience all of those little world-building nuances for themselves, albeit through a virtual character. Still, I think Gee makes a good point that players tend to become quite invested in characters they manipulate, and even more so when they had a hand in customizing that player with certain attributes and characteristics. This investment comes more easily than, say, with a character in a film or in a story.

What I’m kicking around here is the idea that a creative writing instructor could use a good video game to teach narrative and world-building to novice fiction writers who have more experience playing games than reading. The video game could be talked about in terms common to fiction writing (plotting, tension, character development, motivation, etc.) and then you could reverse the process, and look at a short work of fiction as though it was a video game, perhaps even deconstructing a story into some video game elements (skills, attributes, coping strategies, etc.) to help students “see” fiction as a kind of game. For example, I’ve been thinking The Sign of the Four would make a terrific video game.

This is something I am thinking long and hard about. I can smell a paper coming on…

Current Mood: Pondering |

The final assignment in the poetry unit asks students to try their hand at writing some visual poetry. Last semester most students opted for collage, and this semester many more leaned toward the calligrams. A few students chose to do Humument-inspired pieces and I was really impressed with the results and asked if I could share them here.

Clicking on the images will take you to a bigger version so you can read the text and better appreciate the artwork.

Lindsay Davenport	Shawn Matson
Abby Veitch	Megan Zingsheim

Pretty cool, huh?

Current Mood: Beaming with Pride |

On the menu tonight: steak!

Current Mood: Sick as a Dog |

For example, students in my College Writing and Research class often show interest in something Robert Davis and Mark Shadle refer to as a “multimedia research essay,” whereby the writer incorporates a number of different media into the paper: images, music, videos, links, etc. I happen to be interested in the academic hypertext, and I could see students taking a number of unique approaches to constructing a non-traditional research “essay” in the form of a blog or even a small website with a variety of content linked and/or embedded. But there are problems. One, the way our program does portfolio review, there is no mechanism for the assessment of a hypertext document; two, I don’t know if all of my colleagues would feel comfortable applying the course goals and objectives to a hypertext document (though perhaps they would); and three, most students won’t know how to create a multimedia document. And of course, it could also be argued that students in English 102 should focus on rhetorical strategies common to print documents.

For the instructor (i.e. me) it becomes a battle of what stays and what goes in the syllabus if you want to take, say, two weeks to engage with the question of the multimedia research essay. This quickly becomes tricky. And, as I point out earlier, it’s much easier to “make time” during course planning rather than trying to “find time” after the starting gun has been fired.

I’m also reading James Paul Gee’s What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy and I’m buying what he’s selling hook, line, and sinker. Gee’s basic point is not that video games should take the place of classroom learning, but rather that educators should rethink their teaching styles in order to get students as engaged with school material as they are with video games. My memory of my K-12 experience was one of boredom. I did not (and still do not) learn very well by rote, and I tend to get bored with a lack of variety. I distinctly remember one (awful) high school Spanish teacher telling the class with unmistakable irritation that her job was not to entertain us. While I agree with this sentiment, she also went beyond the call of duty to ensure that she never tried anything new to make the material more engaging. Gee makes a lot of great points about situated learning and semiotic domains and I keep saying, “Yup… yup… yup…” as I’m filling up page after page of notes. If you like video games and are interested in education, check it out. It’s fast and pretty accessible.

Gee’s book has also gotten me thinking about creative writing pedagogy and questioning the generic workshop format that’s commonly used. But more on that as I kick it around…

The Champions League kicks off this afternoon (or tonight, if you’re in Europe) and it’s going to be interesting. AC Milan versus Manchester United and Real Madrid versus Lyon on the docket today and both should be good matches. All four of these teams run hot and cold so the first leg matches are very hard to predict. Ah, what the hell, I’ll 2-0 to United and 2-1 to Madrid. I think both Milan and Lyon will be pushing to get a goal at home and will leave themselves exposed to these two good counterattacking teams.

Otherwise I’ve been thinking a lot about the state of European football and some of the changes that UEFA and the Premier League are thinking of instituting, and wondering if we’re nearing another crisis moment between the big clubs in Europe and all the rest. The big talk is how Germany’s clubs are largely sensibly run and community owned, which has led to relatively inexpensive tickets, huge attendances, lots of turnover in the league table, and poor performances in European competition. The problem is that German clubs largely operate within their means, which means they get crushed by teams from other countries with ridiculously deep pocketbooks (Madrid, Barcelona, Chelski) and those big-spending clubs mired in massive debt (Liverpool, Man Ure).

In the next decade, the situation will tip in one of two ways: either something like a European-wide salary cap will come into play and make the playing field a wee bit more competitive, or the European giants will kick their marketing into a higher gear and form a breakaway league that’s sold to a global audience. I’m rooting for the former but expecting the latter; insert your cliche’ about geese and golden eggs here.

Current Mood: Sick |

Chelski’s stumble against Everton doesn’t cheer me up either. I’m first and foremost ABA (Anyone But Ars*nal), and secondly ABU (Anybody But United). In the first part of the week I was somewhat pleased by the media rounding on Arsene Whinger, pointing out quite rightly that Ars*nal have been also-rans for many seasons now and have hardly had a whiff of silverware. Scribes all ’round the planet wrote Ars*nal out of the title race after Sunday’s capitulation to the Russians, yet the midweek catastrophe has (allegedly) kept them in the hunt. We. Shall. See.

There has been much hullabaloo this season about how me might finally see someone crack the top four, considering Liverpool’s poor form and the strengthening of Villa, Spurs, and Man Citeh. Frankly, I never really bought in to this line and figured that the top four would be the top four again only slightly shuffled (don’t believe me? look here). To add to this, I’m not sure any of these pretenders could a) qualify for the group stage of the Champions League, and b) get out of the group stage of the Champions League, which sort of makes me wonder what’s the point. Besides the millions and millions of dollars of course.

Any neutral would tell you that European leagues need a salary cap but that’s never going to happen. A European Super League, featuring the top few from each of the major leagues, seems far more likely. As the rich continue to get richer and no teams can seem to be able to break into the ranks of contenders (see the likes of Sevilla and Valencia in Spain) I feel like it’s all getting quite boring.

Or maybe I’m just old and crabby.

Current Mood: Old and Crabby |

Except reading of course. Last week I finished two books heavier on practice than theory in Teaching the New Writing: Technology, Change, and Assessment in the 21st-Century Classroom and The Digital Writing Workshop. Both had some interesting ideas, but I’m realizing that it’s quite difficult to work digital projects into a class during the course of the semester. It seems like things will work much more smoothly if the course is tailored to these kinds of projects, since you need to dedicate time to scaffolding how to use the necessary technologies over the course of several weeks. Good to get me thinking.

I’m really enjoying A Better Pencil, which is a highly readable account of how the acts of reading and writing have changed since ancient times. Good stuff, and lots of things to incorporate for the next time I teach English 101.

Current Mood: Fine But Tired |

It contains my story “The Hodag,” which first appeared in the UK magazine Black Static. I can hardly wait to tell people how huge I am in Europe!

Current Mood: Molto Felice ed Emozionato |

This past semester I worked on a project developing WordPress websites for academics and writers (funny, that) and decided to once again revamp the site. Now, trenthergenrader.com has a completely different look than this page, where I plan on keeping my blog and its six-year archive as well as links to my personal photos. That page houses my professional information (i.e. writing credits and academic work) that hopefully will come in handy when I hit the job trail in the next two or three years. It seems like a pretty good solution.

(sigh) One of the benefits of getting older (turned 36 last week, thanks for the well-wishes) is that you tend to develop perspective as well. I started following Spurs during the 1990-91 season on the heels of the Italia ‘90 World Cup, having fallen in love with Gary Lineker and Paul Gascoigne. Of course, Spurs won the FA Cup that year, looooooong before you could watch any kind of footie on television on these shores, and it’s been more or less a disappointment since then. Two League Cup wins in about twenty years? Yes, I feel like I’ve been long-suffering enough to be a true Spurs fans.

Tottenham missed out on fourth spot in the 2005-06 season on the last day of the season thanks to a bout of food poisoning known as lasagne gate. I knew then that they’d missed a huge opportunity. In subsequent seasons, they’ve lost Michael Carrick, Dimitar Berbatov, and Robbie Keane when those players were at their peak and I’ve never believed that they had the mettle to crack the top four again. So this season when everyone’s been saying “this is Spurs’ year” I have to say, no, no it’s not.

Even though Spurs have been loitering in spots three through six for the entire season, my hopes have never been raised because I never let myself believe they could pull it off. The home loss to Stoke, the away draw to Everton, the home draw to Hull, and today’s draw to Leeds in the FA Cup: these results reveal Spurs for what they are, and that’s a team that doesn’t have the nerve to see out tough matches. My prediction is that Spurs will have a tepid second-half to the season and will end up in sixth. I hope I’m wrong, I’d love to be wrong, but history is on my side.

I splashed some Christmas and birthday cash on some XBox 360 games: FIFA 10, Bioshock, Assassin’s Creed, and Gears of War 2 to be exact. Besides the soccer game, I got those last ones in a “buy two, get one free” deal that was too good to pass up. Gears 2 wasn’t supposed to be part of the promo but some strange wording in the ad (I misread Gears of War 2 Disc Set) worked to my advantage as the cashier at Best Buy wasn’t sure how to do handle returning an online promotional transaction, so she let me swap for Gears 2 instead of voiding the whole purchase. Yay her, yay me.

My initial reaction to FIFA 10 is disappointment. The game play is better in that you have better control with passing and dribbling, but I’m in that unenviable spot where I can beat Barcelona with Lincoln City on the professional setting, but I can lose to Lincoln City with Barcelona on the next level up. Three of my biggest problems with FIFA 09 was defending against high balls (I lose every header), defenders who either sprint past the striker with the ball or who get nutmegged thirty times a game, and keepers who flap at the most innocuous of shots and crosses. All of these still feature prominently in FIFA 10 too. Also, I lament the fact that so many games are geared towards mastering crazy, split-second controller combinations. I have a feeling that my inability to flick the left-joystick in a clockwise motion while dragging the right one back and holding both triggers down means that I can’t dribble past a single opponent. That’s pretty frustrating. I haven’t tried the manager or Be A Pro modes, but if the game still features these major annoyances, they’re going to be there too.

I took a very brief look at Bioshock and Assassin’s Creed last night and both appear to be highly entertaining. I didn’t realize Bioshock was from the same company that made the Half-Life series and I was a little disappointed at first, because I found parts of Half-Life 2 to be really annoying. Bioshock has some cool features where you can genetically enhance your character and the great weapons management system is still in place, so I’m hoping that they took the best from the Half-Life series and added some other interesting features.

Assassin’s Creed is visually stunning, to quote a cliche’, and I think it will be fun to explore the world beyond the first couple levels I got through last night. On the annoying side, the storyline makes little sense whatsoever (does the main character really need to be a genetic descendant of an assassin, traveling back through time to reenact his life because they share the same genetic code… couldn’t the game just be about a medieval assassin already?) and the basics of climbing buildings and fighting guards already seem a little predictable and repetitive. Also, the cut-scenes are painfully long, made worse by the incoherence of the plot-within-a-plot about finding a traitor to the Brotherhood of Assassin’s organization… or something like that.

I also find it troubling that everyone in the game is Middle Eastern except for the protagonist, who has lily-white skin. Everyone speaks with heavy accents except for the protag, who speaks an “unadulterated” English. Also, the protagonist is by nature violent, rash, and stubborn, and who bristles at being brought to heel by white-bearded elder who tells him he needs to listen and follow directions. Let’s just say I won’t be surprised when said elder turns out to be the traitor in their midst, blah, blah, blah…

Of course, this game will predominantly be played by teens and the above paragraph reaffirms a lot of bad messages. In the next couple weeks I’ll be reading James Paul Gee’s What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy and Good Video Games + Good Learning and I’ll be interested to see how/if he tackles these kinds of issues. It’s early days, but I can’t help but feeling that’s there’s a definite hierarchy of “right and wrong” in Assassin’s Creed that isn’t reinforced by, say, the Grand Theft Auto series, which seem to be amoral. Or maybe it’s that in those games, both the developers and gamers know that what the characters are doing is wrong, wrong, wrong and that’s what makes it fun. Maybe.

More on this as I read more. And hopefully have time to play more too.

Reading and reading and reading and reading, and not loving much of it. I read a dozen books over break and the only one I loved was Blow-Up and Other Stories by Julio Cortázar, although I enjoyed Ben Okri’s The Famished Road quite a bit. For most of the others, there’s a gap between “intellectually interesting” and “enjoyable to read” that’s wider or narrower from title to title. For instance, The Woman Warrior, House of the Spirits, Kingdoms of the World and The Light People were mostly enjoyable reads, while Bearheart and Love in Two Languages were not.

I’m well on my way to blowing last year’s book total out of the water. That number was a mere 43; by this May I should be around 30 or so as I continue to plow through my preliminary exam reading list.

Classes begin Monday. I am more or less prepared and looking forward to it. More or less.

Current Mood: Numb |
Currently Listening To – Uncle Tupelo – “Uncle Tupelo 89/93: An Anthology”

Reading, mostly. I finished my ninth book in three weeks tonight. If you’re interested to see what I’ve been reading, count backwards on this list (or everything between Gordon Henry’s The Light People and The Kingdom of This World by Alejo Carpentier. Tomorrow I begin Gerald Vizenor’s Bearheart, and I plan on finishing Ben Okri’s The Famished Road and hopefully one or two others before school starts again on the 25th.

I also finished my prelim rationale and book list and sent it along to my committee. Two have already signed off adding a book a piece (gah!), but I’m still waiting on two others. My minor area of “digital pedagogy” currently has about 12 books and 70-some articles and that’s probably going to grow, but hopefully not too too much or I’m down the proverbial creek. Fingers crossed all goes well.

Over the past couple days I’ve been plugging away at my spring courses, College Writing and Research and Intro to Creative Writing. In the former I’m changing very little, and in the latter I’m changing quite a lot. I’m also setting up custom websites for both and I plan on using D2L for a bare minimum, although that bare minimum will include submitting all assignments and the grading. This way students can have an accounting of how they’re doing as the semester goes on, and allows me to keep all versions of their work so I can quickly compare draft one to subsequent drafts.

A number of my colleagues have noted a lot of students lobbying (*cough*whining*cough*) for better grades at the end of the semester. I too have noted students trying to apply pressure on me for a specific grade, and I have to say it doesn’t go down well especially when they’ve done mediocre work for most of the semester. (As a related side note, two students have asked “What does it take to get an A in this class?” in the first couple weeks, and then went on to be two of the lazier students I’ve ever had. As if asking the question somehow convinces me from the get-go that they’ve got the right stuff.)

The biggest and most disturbing news to come out of the world of soccer has been the machine gun attack on the Togo National Team’s bus during the African Cup of Nations. Every once in awhile, a news story really strikes home and this one has unsettled me a lot. I think it’s because with the World Cup in South Africa this summer, this was supposed to be the year to showcase the brilliance of African football, but this event sends all the wrong messages. It’s tragic, and my heart goes out to the families, the players, and the fans who should be celebrating the exciting of a major tournament rather than mourning the needless loss of life.

I can’t keep up with all of the twists and turns in the Premier League anymore. One week it looks like Ars*nal are out of the title race and Liverpool will be lucky to finish sixth, then the next week it looks like Ars*nal are contenders once again and Liverpool are right in the mix. And Man Ure and Chelski can’t decide whether they’re even going to put their foot down on the pedal or not. Crazy, riveting stuff. The same is true for the teams chasing fourth, including Tottenham, Villa, and Citeh.

I would much prefer the leagues in England, Spain, and Italy to resemble the German Bundesliga in terms of the competitive aspect. Every year there are six or seven teams vying for the title, which makes it much more exciting to follow than Spain (is it going to be Barcelona or Real Madrid) or the constant shuffling of the top four in England and, to a lesser extent, in Italy. With Man Ure and Liverpool in dire financial trouble right now and Citeh being bankrolled by billionaires, the order could be upset in the next decade. And not a decade too soon…

My story “The Lighthouse Keeper’s Daughter” is now online at Zahir: A Journal of Speculative Fiction. Go read it!

In other news, Ellen Datlow has been forwarding the reviews of The Best Horror of the Year #1 to the book’s contributors and they’re overwhelmingly positive, although a few people complain that the stories aren’t scary enough—which as Ellen points out, horror works in a variety of ways. One Amazon reviewer says that “‘The Hodag’ is the kind of story I would write if I could write better,” which is probably the best compliment I’ve ever received, full stop. The vast majority of reviews, both good and bad, haven’t singled out my story for individual comments but that’s okay. A lot of gushing reviews say the book is great cover to cover, so I’ll take it!

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Yay! for the Badgers, whipping up on Miami in their bowl game. I had serious doubts about this one. And boo! on the Packers for losing to Phoenix, having spotted them the first 14 points. Oh well, better to lose to the Cards than F*vre…

I’ve been playing a lot (too much?) indoor lately, both on the O30 team I signed up for and the open-division team that’s perpetually short of players. Both teams started out hot with a streak of wins, and both teams have hit the skids having lost the last several. I’ve got a strong goal streak going having scored in the last six games or so (including a hat-trick a couple weeks back) but too many of these are in losing causes. Still, I’d rather be scoring goals and losing than not scoring goals and losing. I would take not scoring goals and winning over both, though.

Current Mood: Sure |
Currently Listening To – Wilco – “A.M.”