I recently attended the Symposium on Psycholinguistics in the 21st Century: Solutions, Problems. Perspectives, which was held in Moscow, Russia. The symposium was organized by the Institute of Linguistics of the Russian Academy of Sciences.

I was a part of the a special section on computer mediated communication organized by my colleague and good friend, Professor Olena Goroshko of The National Technological University: Kharkiv Polytechnical Institute, in Kharkiv, Ukraine. My talk dealt with issues of interactivity and pragmatics in online teaching and learning.

As a side project, during the conference, I distributed fliers advertising a special issue of the IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication dedicated to professional writing in global contexts, which I am co-editing with Constance Kampf of the University of Aarhus in Denmark.

Here is what was cool at the Moscow symposium.

• outside of the US, humanities in general and linguistics in particular can be considered more of a "had science", and most people would expect you to produce "hard data" in your conference presentations.
• I got to meet several colleagues with whom we already have ideas for joint teaching and research projects.
  
• questions at sessions are asked not to be polite, but to actually challenge and dissect your ideas. I did not get many of those, but one of the presenters in our panel was grilled by the audience for a good half hour
• of course, the system of references and sources cited in most presentations would be somewhat foreign to US scholars because a lot more Russian and other East European sources are used.

So, it was as great experience, beneficial both to me and, in the long run, for my students who need a "global" perspective on things. Thanks to my department and the Dean of JMU's College of Arts and Letters for generously providing the funds for this trip.

As a "bonus," here are three pictures from the conference



The Facade of the Russian University of the Friendship of Peoples. This is where the conference took place. The name is a remnant from the Soviet system when the main mission of this institution was to educate citizens of friendly foreign lands.



The Plenary session



The word before 1943 says "Vygotsky," in Russian.

I am a big fan of Commoncraft, and I use their instructional videos in my teaching all the time. Well one of my students went evenr further and created a "Commoncraft-style" video as a project for the Digital Rhetoric class. Enjoy.

Businessweek reports that six universities will be partnering with Amazon and "major publishers" to offer student Kindle versions of some textbooks. This may be a good development, but, as I wrote yesterday, it remains to be seen whether those "major publishers" will not use this as another excuse to keep coming up with new "editions" of existing texts and to jack up orices further. 

The article emphasizes that the Kindle itself needs to become more affordable before being embraced by students. I think that it will all depend on the prices of the texts offered. Looking on Amazon this morning, the Kindle sells for $359. While this is no small change for students, it is about the price of 2-3 textbooks these days. So, even with this proice, if the texts offered are priced more reasonably, it might be a bargain. We shall see.

According to rumors, Amazon is due to unveil the new version of Kindle, the "large screen" one. Frederic Landrois speculates on Read/Write/Web that one of the effects of the new Kindle, perhaps an unintentional one, could be the reduction and eventual extinction of the used-textbook market. According to Landrois,

"For textbook publishers, electronic (and DRMed) editions aren't so much about convenience for students, but about cutting out the used-book market, where a lot of students get their books and where the publisher gets absolutely nothing. In 2005, the market for used textbooks in the U.S. was valued at about $1.6 billion, about a third of the total market for educational and professional books."

If that, indeed happens, that would be an unfortunate effect of this otherwise great piece of technology. I remember than when the first Kindle was released, ideas were floated than, rather than having students buy a new set of printed textbooks every semester, publishers could come up with cheaper, electronic versions for Kindle. That way, a student invests in a Kindle and keeps buying electronic versions of books for much less than those books' printed versions. Of course, perhaps allowing that to happen would have been unthinkable if you are a textbook publisher whose only apparent way of making a profit these days is coming up with new "editions" every year which contain minimal content changes but cost more and more.

Earlier this spring, I blogged about the class wiki project my students are I undertookd in the Digital Rhetoric class this semester. Well, the class is nearing its completion, and a large part of the project are on wikibooks.org. It is called, simply, Digital Rhetoric.

By and large, the creation of this first version on the book went smoothly, with only a few minor obstacles. Of course, this is the first step and, if I teach the course again, I plan to ask the new group of students to revise and add to these existing chapters. By the way, the way I see it, the problem of project sustainability and keeping up-to-date is one of the most challenging aspects of writing and publishing open access wikibooks.

I know, it is only April, but I am already planning for next fall's classes. The biggest challenge is finding suitable texts. It is not, of course, the first time that I am teaching first-year composition, but I just cannot seem to find one or two texts (in print or online) which would be good enough for me to stay with them for many semesters or even years. So, I keep experimenting and changing things around every term.

I have expressed by lack of enthusiasm for the mainstream first-year comp texts out there many times before and in different venues. It is not that there aren't any "good" texts out there, but their cost really doesn't make any sense to me or my students, especially given the undeniable fact that we won't be able to go through everything in a 600-page reader in one semester.

So, I am looking at online texts. Because I teach a section of the course which focuses on rhetoric of science and the impact of science and technology on society, luckily there are some good choices out there. I am currently considering, among other things, Amy Harmon's Pulitzer Prize winning series The DNA Age. If these texts were to become my students composition "reader," then I could supplement them with some texts of writing, reading, and rhetoric, plus use of the free "handbook style" websites for grammar, citations, and mechanics.

The search continues.

This morning, I checked my Flickr page and saw that someone with the username mctwining has added two of my photos (this and this) to his or her favorites. I am flattered of course, but I am wondering why mctrining chose not to share any of his or her photos with anyone if he or she likes to look at and favorite other people's photos.

Surely, Flickr does give users the option to keep their images private, and I use that option extensively. In fact, I have more private images on my account than public ones. However, to me, the real power of Flickr is that it is a social network for photographers and, if you are going to favorite other people's photos, you should reciprorate in a similar manner and let others see at least parts of your own collection.

The power of Flickr, the thing that sets it apart from Google's Picasa and many other photosharing sites is the ability to social network through sharing photos easily. See my post to that effect below where I discuss the White House Flickr stream.

Or, am I being naive and did I get faavorited by a bot? I doubt it, though.

A few weeks ago, I was contacted by Lawrence King Publishers who offered to sent me a free copy of the large and glossy book Essentials of Visual Communication, by Bo Bergstom. Nice gesture, of course, but, as many of us, I am typically skeptical of publishers' offers of free books thinking that all they are trying to do is get me to make my students buy their books.  The composition marjket in the US seems to keep reprinting the same books under new titles every year, and I have stopped hoping for some new views on composition teaching coming from the big players in the publishing industry in this country.

Bergstom's book truly does not disappoint, and I'd seriously consider using it next time I teach visual rhetoric. Here's why.

The way I see it, texts on visual communication typically fall into one of two categories:

• highly theoretical and sometimes inaccessible to undergraduates. See, for example Kress and Van Leeuwen's Reading Images: Grammar of Visual Design. It is an excellent text, but you need a serious background in linguistics and semiotics to understand its argument. I have assigned that book in the past and my students bravely tried to work through it, but I felt that it was usually a little above their heads (and my own head too, at times, for that matter). Another title from this category would be Hill and Helmers' Defining Visual Rhetorics. This book is different from Kress and Van Leeuwen's work in that it tries to look at manifestations of visual persuasion in various "life" situations. The essays are engaging, but they, too might be a little two theoretical for an average undergraduate.
• In the other category are books that are typically geared towards technical and scientific communication students and professionals and focus on the utilitarian practicalities of document and graphic design. Surely, they include some theory and conceptual discussions, but their primary goal is to tell about the "hows," rather than the "whys." This is not a criticism of such titles, just that their purpose is to provide practical solutions to people who want those solutions. Among such titles is Kimball and Hawkins' Document Design: A Guide for Technical Communicators. It is a very good text, but its audience is fairly narrow and it considers document design and visual communication in the context of what technical communicators do when they design documents, nothing else.

The attractive aspect of this book is the combination of accessibly discussed "larger issues" behind visual communication and practical steps for implementation of visual communication projects. A good portion of the book is devoted to what I'd call ways of conducting rhetorical analyses of visual texts, or critical reading of those texts. There is also a section on story telling with images, which is a very nice addition since more other texts are missing those types of discussions.

The second half of the book is devoted to practical issues and strategies: fonts, color schemes, interplay of media, and so on.

I was also pleasantly surprised to see the image of the fascinating Web Trend Subway Map, as well as the inclusion into the discussion of various forms and media of visual communication, from text and still image, to television and sound.

Overall, this is a very comprehensive text, one worth looking at if you teach or study visual persuasion and communication.
 

Not surprising that the Obama administration has followed the postings of the weekly video address online with a slideshow on Flickr. OK, I admit, I am a big fan and avid user of Flickr. I think that it is the best photosharing service around right now, period. I think that what is really cool about the White House posting these on Flickr rather than on some official one-way channel like the WH website itself is that you and I can go and leave comments on these photos. And there are some funny comments on some of those photos. Some might call this irreverance towards the Office of the President' I call it rhetorical sensitivity on the part of the Obama administration which understands pretty well how to reach the masses. At least, it has shown in during its first 100 days.

It looks like there is a new player in the online document review field: Backboard. I read about it on the Read/Write/Web blog this morning and have been playing with it for a while. Basically, what it allows you to do is share documents with others, online, and leave written comments on those documents. Looks like a neat little tool, although I am still not sure whether it would be more useful for my purposes than, say, Google Docs or Google sites, both of which also allow users to leave written comments.

I suppose that Backboard would claim that it offers better security to enterprise users, at least if you are using a premium account which costs a few bucks a month. Oh, and I think the choice of the name for this new service is somewhat unfortunate--too close to my all-time "favorite," Blackboard.