A DIFFERENT Netoric's Tuesday Cafe 8-13-96 (fwd)

[Eric Crump <wleric@showme.missouri.edu>]

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Sun, 11 Aug 1996 20:47:02 -0600
From: Fred Kemp <ykfok@ttacs1.ttu.edu>
To: Multiple recipients of list RHETNT-L <RHETNT-L@MIZZOU1.MISSOURI.EDU>
Subject: A DIFFERENT Netoric's Tuesday Cafe 8-13-96

     *************************************************************
            Please come to Netoric's Tuesday Cafe Discussion
                                   for
                              August 13, 1996
                              8:00 p.m. EDT
                 in Netoric's Tuesday Cafe on MediaMOO

                                 Topic:

          Training the New Generation of Computers and Writing Enthusiasts


                               To join us:
         Telnet to MediaMOO at purple-crayon.media.mit.edu 8888
         connect guest OR connect your character if you have one
                             @go Tuesday
                If you're new to Netoric and/or MOOing,
         Netoric's Information and MOOhelpsheet is available at
             http://www.ucet.ufl.edu/~tari/netoricinfo.html
      **************************************************************

Fred Kemp here.  Tari's out of town this week, so the old guy is moving
into the captain's chair temporarily.  Pardon the inescapable
cross-postings.

I invite the Tuesday Cafe afficionados and computers and writing nuts
everywhere to drop into a computers and writing course that I and Texas
Tech offered this semester that is concluding this very Tuesday (irony upon
irony).  I've taught this class three times before, always very
differently.  This time, I've taken what Paul Leblanc said in Logan, Utah,
at the computers and writing conference, to heart, and built a graduate
course around it.

What?  You've forgotten what Paul said?  He said, in effect (pardon my
errors in reconstructing what you said, Paul), that the possibility of
innovation within existing academic structures is practically nil.  He
cited a study describing the development of the computer hard disk and
laptop computing to show how innovative people MUST break free of existing
structures and the restrictions upon imagination and expectation that
static organizational structures NECESSARILY employ.  He also said (the
audience gasped) that the corporate world presented the best employment
possibilities for the graduate sparkplugs currently changing the way
learning happens for society, something they do with little chance for what
the majority of society considers a decent living wage.

Too glum?  Check the statistics.  Check the projections.  Forget moving
gracefully into that ivory tower smoking jacket and the unstressful tombs
of the research library, cradled gently in the bowels of academic
monasticism.  What's out there for too many highly educated and very bright
people is closer to moving the forty-ton blocks of stone for the Pharoh
Anaknaton than the don-hood of Oxford and Cambridge.

In the past I've taught Computers and Writing (English 5365 at Texas Tech)
as a fairly wild but nevertheless usual dump of information upon the
graduate student munchkins, implicitly assuming that they come to me for
wisdom and enlightenment.  This year, fired with Leblanc's intelligent and
(for me) moving plenary presentation, I decided to forego the knowledge
dump business (at last as much as an old proscenium egoist could manage).

I told my students to break free of their Marxist chains and to go forth
and build a company, "Integrated Learning Ecologies, Inc.," with which they
would plow through the academic and administrative slag heap like Charlie
Bronson's Mack Truck through a Mississippi state police barracade.  I said
to them, if they couldn't make it work at the bottom line, if they couldn't
make it live on its own merits, then they should think of this in terms of
their own individual entrepreneurialship when they hit the blood-stained
floors of MLA.

Tough talk, and not universally well accepted.  Come and talk to my eleven
students on Tuesday night, and before that see our class at
http://english.ttu.edu/courses/5365/kemp/su96

Find out from them if they liked this blatantly corporate scenario and my
insistance that I would teach them nothing, that we had no textbook, that
what they did they did as a part of their own self-sponsored investigation.


The Tofflers talk about "alternative channels of learning."  Is it wrong
for an academic,the toadiest of society's toady's, to toss the textbooks
into the trash can (a la Sidney Poitier) and make students do the brain
work for themselves, REALLY for themselves?

Fred Kemp
f.kemp@ttu.edu