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various notes
``` Various notes relating to RRE, followed by some discussion of my request for comments on my students' draft term papers.
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Over the last few months, the traffic on RRE has been creeping up from about 7 messages per week to about 12. (I went back to the archive that Kee Hinckley maintains -- see the RRE Web page -- and counted.) I am well aware that people start to feel overloaded at about 9 or 10, and so I will try to get the level of traffic back down. More people have been answering my request for submissions, and the passage of the telecom bill has created all sorts of news. In the future, much more material will get stored in the RRE Archive but not posted to the whole list. The RRE Archive now contains nearly 300 useful items; for details, send a message to rre-request@weber.ucsd.edu with "Subject: archive send index".
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RRE will probably be intermittent over the next couple of weeks while I travel. I'll be in Boston on March 27th-30th for CFP, New York on March 31st and April 1st, Philadelphia on April 2nd, back in Boston on April 3rd-5th to give a talk at the Media Lab (the talk is on the 3rd, but I don't know what time), and in Toronto on April 6th-8th. Let me know if anything cool is happening at any of those coordinates.
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My brilliant students have finished their papers about activities and genres. If you would like to read them, you can find them through the following URL:
http://communication.ucsd.edu/pagre/internet-papers.html
The topics include alcohol advertising, graffiti, political magazines, rave flyers, subpoenas, how-to books, soap operas, press releases, comic books, abstract-expressionist paintings, and coupons. Each paper also considers a genre of materials found on the Internet, though the analysis for these genres is necessarily more exploratory than for the genres in more familiar media.
You may recall that I sent a message to RRE asking people to send the students constructive comments on their drafts. I do not know exactly how many people responded, since the comments went straight to the students as private mail. The numbers were not enormous. But some of the comments were extraordinarily useful. I would particularly like to recognize the thorough and intelligent comments of Tony Salvador of Intel in Oregon, who read several of the papers, understood exactly what we were trying to accomplish, and provided clear guidance to the students on how to deepen their analysis.
I appreciated Tony's comments on the students' papers for one reason in particular. Most of our undergraduates have what I regard as an old- fashioned model of how their education will help them after they finish school. It's a vocational model: you go to school, you learn a skill, and then you get a job using that skill. The problem is, whatever skill you learn today will be obsolete next year, particularly in the communication field. Reading and writing and arithmetic are crucial, of course, and I'm a fundamentalist about those basics. But beyond that, the most important skill is analytical thinking: you have to be able to read the morning paper and understand what it means for your field, your workplace, and your career. And to work in media, you need analytical skills to help you understand new media, new genres, new production methods, new forms of industrial organization, and new career paths. That's what my courses are about, including this one. For someone from Intel -- Intel! -- to provide the students with sound analytical instruction helped to ratify this important truth.
Some people misunderstood my intention in asking for comments on my students' papers. A couple of people suggested that I was being lazy, trying to get people on the Internet to do my job for me. (One really unpleasant person from the University of Western Ontario abused me about this at great length.) Never mind that I don't know any other professors who routinely read drafts of their students' term papers. The real point is that term papers have long been an artificial exercise; it's demoralizing, after all, to spend long hours writing something that only one person in the whole universe will ever read. I want the students to learn that reading and writing are social activities. If they get comments on their writing from many people then they will internalize many points of view, so they can write from a concrete sense of the potential reactions of a real audience.
Of course this exercise cannot scale up; a hundred classes could not broadcast requests for comments at the same time. Instead I think we should have draft-commenting cooperatives. Classes on similar topics at different universities could be matched up, and students could be assigned to write comments on papers by students at the other schools. These comments would be cc'ed back to the teachers and graded like any other assignment. Students would be taught how to write comments, just as they are taught any other skill. It's a nice thought anyway.
Phil ```
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