The Ever Present Presence of the Spoken Word
The more I read in cognitive studies, the more I find that Ong was already there, working with ideas and theories that cognitive studies is now exploring or finding to be true. Let me juxtapose two snippets I’ve come across in the past few days, one from Ong’s “Comment: Voice, Print, and Culture” (The Journal of Typographic Research 4.1 (1970): 77-83), which expresses a common Ongian theme, and one from Jeanne Fahnestock’s “Rhetoric in the Age of Cognitive Science” (The Viability of the Rhetorical Tradition. Ed. Richard Graff, Arthur E. Walzer, and Janet M. Atwill. Albany: State U of New York P, 2005. 159-179): Read more
Resoures for Teching Science Fiction
This is a follow up to my earlier post on defining science fiction. While not intended to be exhaustive, here are a number of resources I’d recommend new teachers of science fiction.
First, I’d strongly recommend reading Tom Shippey’s “Preface: Learning to Read Science Fiction” (in Fictional Space: Essays on Contemporary Science Fiction. Ed. Tom Shippey. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1991) and/or “Literary Gatekeepers and the Fabril Tradition” (Science Fiction: Canonization, Marginalization and the Academy. Ed. Gary Westfahl and George Slusser. Greenwood Press, 2001. 7-23). As I noted in my earlier post, based on my experience, one should assume that a good number of students in a SF class won’t be regular readers of the genre, and SF requires different reading strategies than “mundane” literature. Shippey addresses these differences, and foregrounding them early on in the course can help students work through the texts more easily. Read more
Defining Science Fiction
In the past few days, I’ve gotten two different requests for resources and suggestions for teaching a course on science fiction. Having taken, TA’d, or taught science fiction and fantasy courses at the University of Colorado, Portland State University, and Saint Louis University, I can say with some certainty that the majority of students in such a class will not be regular readers of the genre, which suggests to me that one should begin such a course by providing some initial definitions of the genre.
I like to begin the first day by asking students to define science fiction and the initial definitions usually involve space ships and robots, rely heavily on technology and science, and is set in the future. Those students widely read in SF will help problematize these pop-culture assumptions by mentioning works from subgenres such as alternate history and psychomyth which can have little to do with technology or science and be set in the past or the never-time of myth. As we begin to define science fiction, I identify some subgenres to give a sense of the broad range of texts science fiction covers (alternate history, space opera, posthistory, psychomyth, fantastic voyages, near future, steampunk) and we discuss the difference between hard and soft science fiction. I then hand out the following definitions, and we go over them. We return to these definitions throughout the course and I encourage students to find or develop their own. Feel free to make use of any of this. Read more
Campus Audio Tours and Other FYC Assignments
I don’t think I’ve yet talked about my teaching this semester. I’m currently teaching “The Process of Composition,” which is the first of our two-semester FYC sequence. Our current project is creating audio tours of campus, which is a new assignment for me. The class has divided into groups and each group chose a theme such as resources useful for new students and biographies of the people for whom various buildings were named.
After choosing a theme and a target audience, each group decided upon locations and then they conducted research — the University Archives, interviews, literature from the Web and flyers, etc. I had them use a Wiki to organize the work, share information, and write and edit scripts for each location. They then conducted live walk-throughs of the tour with their group and revise the scripts again. We’re now in the process of doing full class walk-throughs of each tour. They will take the scripts through one more revision and then turn them in to me for comment. They’ll revise again and then record their scripts. The DIY media lab has the necessary equipment and it’s easy to use. Read more
Turning a Blind Eye? Composition and Cognitive Studies
As many of you probably know, CompFAQ has suggested reading lists on a number of topics including teaching basic writing, top five recommended books and articles for new teachers, feminist writing and rhetoric, and theory and the teaching of composition. Browsing through the Theory and the Teaching of Composition Studies: A Short Bibliography list today, I was at first happy to find Cognitive Theory as one of the entries. As I ocassionally complain, composition studies, after flirting with cognitive studies in the late 1970s and early 1980s, hasn’t paid much attention to cognitive studies since and has largely ignored the “cognitive turn” of the past twenty years. While I wouldn’t expect a large list because the bibliography is meant to be short with just a few entries for each subject, I’d dismayed by what is listed as it only proves my point. At the risk of sounding too critical, is Jerome S. Bruner’s 1973 Beyond the Information Given: Studies in the Psychology of Knowing the best we can do?
A random handful of books pulled off my desk provides this list:
- Kosslyn, Stephen M., and Olivier Koenig, eds. Wet Mind: The New Cognitive Neuroscience. New York: The Free Press, 1992.
- Byrnes, James P. Minds, Brains, and Learning: Understanding the Psychology and Educational Relevance of Neuroscientific Research. New York: The Guilford Press, 2001.
- Hogan, Patrick Colm. Cognitive Science, Literature, and the Arts: A Guide for Humanists. New York: Routledge, 2003.
- Torrance, Mark, and Gaynor C. Jeffrey, eds. The Cognitive Demands of Writing: Processing Capacity and Working Memory in Text Production. Amsterdam: Amsterdam UP, 1999.
- Pugh, Sharon L., Jean Wolph Hicks, and Marcia Davis. Metaphorical Ways of Knowing: The Imaginative Nature of Thought and Expression. Urbana, IL: NCTE, 1997.
- Kellogg, Ronald T. The Psychology of Writing. New York: Oxford UP, 1994.
And that list doesn’t even include relevant broader studies of memory such as Edward Casey’s Remembering: A Phenomenological Study (1987, 2000), relevant works from cognitive rhetoric such as Giles Fauconnier and Mark Turner’s The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending and the Mind’s Hidden Complexities (2002), or even works from mainstream composition studies texts that draw heavily from cognitive studies even if they don’t advertise themselves as such like Patricia Dunn’s Talking, Sketching, Moving: Multiple Literacies in the Teaching of Writing (2001).
I guess I need to create a short list and pass it on to CompFAQ.
Science Photography
From The Neurophilosopher’s weblog, I came across the photography of Satoshi Kuribayashi, who has been awarded the Lennart Nilsson Award for science photography. Here are two of the very cool photos:
On Language and Thought
Mixing Memory has a repost on cognitive science’s return to linguistic relativity.
Over the last decade or so, however, cognitive scientists have been revisiting linguistic relativity (linguistic determinism is probably gone for good). They’ve discovered that language does in fact constrain the way we perceive and conceptualize a wide variety of things, including time, space, number, events, and perhaps even color (see this article for a short and accessible summary of some of the research, along with a nice reference section). In 2003, a collection of essays describing much of the research on linguistic relativity was published under the title Language in Mind: Advances in the Study of Language and Thought. It’s an excellent book (and it includes a chapter by Michael Tomasello, for those of you who are in the reading group), presenting many interesting ideas and experiments. I highly recommend it for people who are interested in the topic. To give you a taste, I thought I’d post on one chapter ["Sex, Syntax, and Semantics"], which I chose both because I find it very interesting, and because the chapter is available, in its entirety, online.
The full post provides a summary of Lera Boroditsky, Lauren Schmidt, and Webb Phillips’ “Sex, Syntax, and Semantics,” which is linked to above.
As I’ve stated many times before, much of Ong’s own work is rooted in an understanding that language use can give us insights into cognition, dating back to his dissertation work. As he explains it, while working in the Biblioteque Nationale in Paris, he came across Rudolph Bultmann’s reference to the idea that knowing was located in terms of hearing and sound for the ancient Hebrews and in terms of seeing and vision for the ancient Greeks.
A Pedagogy of the Long Tail?
Based on a discussion of the long tail of user attention at The Dealmaker, Alex of Digital Digs muses on the teaching to the long tail:
So I guess I’m thinking that part of the deal is thinking about a “pedagogy of/for the disengaged.” If you’re building a website, you want your site to be accessible for that casual user, so that s/he can get what s/he needs. In the classroom we tend to make engagement into an ethical if not a moral responsibility. But maybe there is another way.
Maybe you don’t have to be, shouldn’t have to be, “engaged” in every classroom. I can’t say I was often an engaged student. I was more likely to take what I needed from a course and do what I had to do.
So there’s a different type of question here. It’s not “how do I encourage the disengaged student to become engaged?” but “how do I design a course to improve the disengaged user experience?” Perhaps these are the same question, that is, perhaps improving the user experience tends to increase engagment. But I’m thinking about making it easier for the student who wants to learn on his/her own terms through my course without engaging in the terms of the course as I define them. [Read more.]
I don’t have any answers, but it is an interesting question.
More on the Flores “Hobbit”
Earlier this week, I read on ArcheoBlog that the latest report on the Flores hominid provides “compelling” evidence that it is not a new species but a modern human microcephaliac. And then, I read today at NewScientist.com that the jury is still out because a few weeks earlier, a different study concluded that the Flores hominid’s skull they studied “does not have the shape of a microcephaliac,” and that a third researcher has stated that it is a new species and that “The brain is a combination of features I’ve never seen in any other primate.”
“Commonplaces and the contents of argumentation”
Keeping with the theme of the Humanities’ potential to provide insights for the cognitive sciences, I offer this bit from my reading today, taken from Michael Billig’s “Psychology, Rhetoric, and Cognition” (The Recovery of Rhetoric: Persuasive Discourse and Disciplinarity in the Human Sciences. Ed. R. H. Roberts and J. M. M. Good. Charlottesville: U P of Virginia, 1993. 119-136):
When rhetoricians argued about such a case as that of Epaminondas, they did not merely use the grammatical syntax of negation to oppose the counter-view. They may have used the identifiable proposition forms of negation — counterposing propositions of quantity to those of quality — but their arguments would have contained content as well as form. They argued about ideas, values, and character as they discussed over and over again what it meant to be a hero or a criminal, and whether Epaminondas’ character was such that a special case should be made for him. The important point, stressed by the textbooks of rhetoric, was that speakers might have to invent the particular arguments to be used on the rhetorical occasion, but they did not have to invent the basic materials from which these speeches where constructed. Thus the individual speaker does not invent the values (perhaps of heroism or of obedience to the law) to which an appeal is to be made. Instead the speaker draws upon the value-laden vocabularies which are shared with the audience. To use the old rhetorical term, the speaker will use ‘commonplaces’ in a discourse. In so doing, the speaker appeals to, and speaks within, the sensus communis, or the sense which is commonly shared. Read more
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