05.24.06

The Influence of Individuals

Posted in Rant at 9:19 pm by Lisa Spangenberg

I’ve been watching an interesting saga unfold; bear with me while I expound.

I’m a member of a community for writers called “Absolute Write.” It’s a combination of a resource site and an online community, with a particular emphasis on outreach and advocacy for writers. There are a lot of scams that target naive writers, including scam publishers and scam literary agents. The creator, owner, and beloved founder of AbsoluteWrite even co-wrote The Street-Smart Writer as a self-defense guide to help new writers navigate through the many scams.

Absolute Write is temporarily off the Web because one such less than professional literary agent, Barbara Bauer, took exception, as she is wont to do, to being included on a list of the Twenty Worst Agents, a list that was carefully researched, and documented, and provided as service by the Science Fiction Writers of America, a respected professional organization. Barbara Bauer bullied the somewhat naive ISP into taking down the entire site, by virtue of a phone call. You can read about the saga here.

Absolute Write will be back, and probably will be by the time you read this, but this incident is an example of the chilling effect such actions have.

But it’s also an example of the influence of individuals on the Web as a whole. I first heard about this last night, via an IM from someone who works as a moderator at Absolute Write. I knew something odd was going on because I was logged on when the site disappeared.

Teresa Nielsen Hayden, a very well known editor, and prominent blogger, posted about the takedown here. Teresa, or TNH, has posted about Bauer before, here and here, where she tried to get TNH fired. Then others picked up the story and posted.

Here are some good sources about agents and about getting an agent.

Updated: I’ve been adding links as they appear.

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05.06.06

Tools for Teaching

Posted in Pedagogy and Scholarship at 10:22 am by Lisa Spangenberg

I’ve been attending the Medieval Congress in Kalamazoo. On Thursday I attended a panel on “hybrid teaching,” that is, replacing a fair amount of class room instruction with Internet based instruction. It’s not, frankly, a concept that I’m overly fond of; I think face-to-face live instruction is to be preferred, whenever possible. I also don’t think that “distant education” is always a good alternative.

This panel discussion, however, was great. All three of the teachers were extremely talented and experienced class room teachers, with really super ideas about teaching literature, ideas which they’d found very clever ways to express using digital technology. But each of them apologized for what they saw as a lack of technical skills.

I don’t think there was any sort of failure on their part, at all, but I do think that the technology they were given to use failed them. Most of them used WebCT or its slightly less wretched cousin Blackboard. These are both complicated and poorly designed Learning Management Systems, and they require a fair amount of training, and a heck of a lot of clicking, to produce non-standared Web pages that are exceedingly rigid and don’t meet basic 508 standards for disabled users.

We need to do a much better job in terms of the technology we expect teachers and students to use. These teachers had super ideas, and coped superbly with the technology they had to use— but it should have been much easier and less labor intensive. It occurred to me, listening to them, that most of them could have done exactly what they wanted, with either ordinary HTML pages, or a Blogging system, like Blogger or Live Journal.