A question of tone

For the paper-- A friend suggested that I interview Ellie.
So I was writing that "you don't know me, but we have a mutual friend in Jenny". I typed after that, "Would you mind answering some questions?"
 
And that just sounded sort of more like a demand than a request, so I changed it to "Would you mind if I asked you a few questions?" 
 
I'm trying to keep track of "tone changes" and the change from negative construction to positive in sentences for an eventual paper. Eventually. :) Send examples if you come across them?
Alicia

Plagiarism? Pshaw.

I do NOT need another Best Practices Memo topic, but the Engage discussion going on currently about plagiarism-- mostly about "how to catch it so the students can be disciplined"-- seems so wrong-headed and against all our theories! (Except maybe behaviorism -- punishing "wrong action"-- but even behaviorism doesn't just randomly punish confusion.) I think a more positive approach would be to help students learn to use sources better, and oh, by the way, also avoid plagiarism. It's really like eating rather than smoking. Smoking is just bad for you, so it's a good thing to avoid. But you can't avoid eating, like you can't avoid using sources in an academic paper. The thing is to eat RIGHT, and that you might have to be trained in (me, I'd eat wrong at every opportunity left to my own devices). Similarly, students are expected to use sources in their writing and research, and it's not enough to tell them, "Use sources. Avoid plagiarizing said sources." We have to tell them HOW. We're teachers. This is something that can be taught.

Universities might work on more coordinated definitions of "plagiarism," because this isn't quite like "armed robbery," easy to define. My sister went to a school with an "honor code," where with every assignment they had to write and sign that they had not "given nor received help" in this assignment. Well, that really doesn't work much anymore, when we expect students to brainstorm together, to ask for help in class, to visit the tutoring centers. We want them to learn to seek out and evaluate help from others, don't we? Well, then that "connectivism" shouldn't be regarded as an academic crime.

Except for the egregious cases (lifting a whole article and passing it off as your own), plagiarism is usually a matter of missing attribution and overuse of sources. Most students don't actually want to plagiarize, and on the one hand, we're stressing they need to use X number of sources, and other the other hand, "Don't use too many sources too closely." This is a teachable moment. Why is what this student did running afoul of the plagiarism rules? What could he/she have done differently to stay within the rules? Working with the student's own paper, we could be showing how this use of a source could have been done "legally," how this quote could have been better as a paraphrase, how the student's own ideas could form the topic sentences, and the sources used only as support... these are part of the writing tasks, and can be taught and learned just like any other writing task.

But I think we need to distinguish between "pure plagiarism," where there's a clear intent to pass off someone else's writing as your own, and the confused type, where the student is trying to use sources and does it badly. 20 years of teaching writing and writing center work tells me-- MOST students use sources badly at first, but they can be taught to do better.

The first thing I think is to make sure that the paper is structured around the student's ideas, rather than sources, which could mean that the student do an outline or a draft BEFORE reading much in the sources-- sketching out the issues within this topic and focusing on ideas, and only then starting the research. That's sort of heretical, but I think a student who starts with a basic sketch of "this is what I want to explore or analyze, and here are the parts" is then positioned to use sources the way they should be used-- as support for the student's points.

Alicia

Multiplicity: A Novelist's Journey

Multiplicity 

Patient: Doctor, I think I'm going crazy.  Sometimes I find that I'm talking to myself inside my head.

Doctor: Now, now, I wouldn't start worrying about it until someone starts talking back.

Patient: Well.... 

Admit it.  You've got a nagging doubt about all those voices in your head.  They not only talk back to you, they argue with each other.  Sometimes you get headaches because they stomp around and slam doors.   When you read Three Faces of Eve, you realized if someone wrote about your multiple personality syndrome, it would be Three Hundred Faces.

Oh, yeah, I know.  It's different for you.  You're not crazy.  Crazy people can't tell the difference between reality and fantasy, and you can.  Right.  Consider that time your spouse came in and found you dissolved in tears at your keyboard, and you looked up and said, "I couldn't help it.  I had to kill Joey off."  Who was more real to you at that moment, your living spouse or the dead Joey?

 It's always been like this for you, hasn't it?  While your little friends were dressing their Barbies up, you'd already endowed Ken with a dark secret, a dangerous smile, and a lethal set of double entrendres.  Other kids quit "making pretend" when they started making out.  Not you.  (You even found yourself murmuring "My hero!" after your first kiss, didn't you?)  And while your college classmates were struggling to understand Othello, you were already plotting the sequel, The Redemption of  Iago.

Then adulthood arrived, and so did shame.  Like Adam and Eve, you learned to keep a fig leaf over your private parts– it's just your private parts were inside your head.  You didn't tell your soap-loving best friend about how you managed to get her favorite characters back together.  And though you confessed every last little real-life crush to your significant other, you knew better than to reveal the fictional hunks leaning insolently against the doorways to your imagination.  You knew even the people who loved you the most just wouldn't understand. In fact, they'd think you were... crazy. 

And then the miracle happened.  You met a fiction writer, or took a writing class, or joined a writing group, and as you listened, what you heard spread wonder through you. Other people had voices too.  Other people– regular people, by the looks of them, with jobs and families just like you– muttered both sides of an imaginary conversation as they drove home through rush-hour traffic.  Other people bought three baby-name books years before they had babies; they too had mental sextuplets to christen.

Do you remember that moment when you realized you weren't alone?  And you weren't crazy?  It was liberating and joyous and it transformed your life.  All you had to do about those people in your head was ... write them down.  You just had to take all those secret jottings and connect them into a plot.  You could use all your elaborate theorizing on their childhoods and call it backstory.  You could take all those crazy floorplans of their castles and call it setting. Then you could give the characters the ending they deserved, and the entire universe, at least the one behind your eyes, would be restored to order, and you could call that plotting.

Since then, you've never looked back, have you?  In the community of writers, it's 
perfectly okay to spend more time decorating your hero's home than you ever spent on your own.  Your writing friends know better than to sneak out and dial 911 when you're discussing your villain's favorite poisons.  They listen sympathetically to your complaints that even after you've killed her mother and blinded her father, your heroine still insists on being as perky as Sandra Bullock.

All this support, however, has made you forget how deeply weird it is to live inside your characters while they live inside you.

  

But here I am to remind you of this paradox: Making fictional humans has the simultaneous effect of making authors both more and less human themselves.Non-writers, I think, assume that we paint from life, that we get our ability to characterize from close observation of our fellow "real people."  (Only writers, by the way, will understand why I put "real people" in quotes there.  It's not like our characters aren't real people too, right?) It's true, we do our share of people-watching, although I suspect for many of us it's more a matter of blocking the motion than deciphering the emotion– "So that's how a man yanks open the door and gets out of the car in one fluid movement!" We are properly appreciative of all the subtle variations of human psychology, and if we have a pen handy, we jot our observations down.

But just as often it's the reverse: We understand the people outside our head because we know the ones inside.  Like Walt Whitman, we contain multitudes, and all we have to do sometimes is ask, and they'll tell us who and what they are– and why.  It's all too easy to extrapolate from their revelations to the motives and values of everyone around us.  (When I was in graduate school in the English program, I took as an elective a Criminal Behavior psychology course.  Impressed with my paper on what combination of background factors produce what variety of crime, the professor asked if I were a social worker who worked with many offenders.  "No, " I replied, "I'm a writer, and I have a lot of villains.")

We need characters to fill every role, so we might take on the tolerant attitude of "it takes all kinds of people to build a world." Unfortunately, the tolerance we have for some of our characters can be disorienting when we try to apply it to their counterparts in the real world.  I can just imagine Thomas Harris's justification for bestowing connubial bliss upon Hannibal the Cannibal– "Serial murderers need a happy ending too!"  Let's just say, we might not be the best jurors for Jeffrey Dahmer's trial.

The problem is, once we construct the backstory for our characters, we realize everyone in the world has backstory too– traumas and issues and dark pasts that affect their present behavior.  So we search in their actions for some rich and complex motivation, which can make us more intuitive about other people's feelings than almost any shrink.  We know that the boy standing defiant on the playground is trying to conceal his loneliness and longing for a friend.  We know the girl looking up from her book is trying to get up her courage to approach him. That's the wonderful empathy of authors.

The problem is, while we're melting with sympathy for them, we're also plotting how, if we were in charge of this story, we'd have the school bully (hmmm... probably acting out because his father beats him, or maybe his mother's abandoned him?) taunt the boy and then the girl would rush to his defense–

In other words, we would turn those real people into characters.

It happens all the time.  We'll be watching the news, sincerely weeping sympathetic tears as some parent whose child has gone missing begs for her safe return... while idly thinking that there's something a bit off about the gestures and expression there, and wouldn't it be cool if it turned out that the parent actually murdered the child and buried her – That's sick.  (And it doesn't make us feel much better when it turns out, three days later, our fiction is actually fact.)

Or our best friend will be lamenting her mother's increasing frailty, and we'll mention our last heroine's conflict about putting her mother in a nursing home.  And we're surprised and ashamed when the friend snaps, "My mother's broken hip, alas, is real, not some subplot that's going to be wrapped up neatly by Chapter 14!"

But we do agree, don't we, that there is no reason for a husband to object to an entirely rational discourse on the allure of a  flinty-eyed tattooed Adonis ex-cop of a hero?  (And that is nothing at all like our justifiable irritation when he says, as he closes the cover of our latest release, "You know, I'd like to take your heroine straight to bed."  He's.... he's objectifying her!)

Let's face it.  Sometimes our amazing ability to bring characters to life gets a little scary.  It isn't just that our life becomes fodder for our fiction; sometimes, as we try out our characters' poses and test their value system, our life starts to imitate our fiction. It might start with the helpful query "What would my resourceful heroine do?" whenever we're confronted with a difficult decision.  But soon, we're taking self-defense classes because she's getting stalked.  Think of poor Stephen King.  He recalls the spookily cheerful driver of the van that nearly killed him as "a character out of one of my own novels." (And the driver died mysteriously, alone in his trailer-- of course it was a trailer-- a few months later... insert Twilight Zone music, please.)

There is magic in this ability of ours to imagine people so completely, but it's a dark magic too.  A wonderful empathy guides us to embody universal human issues in unique characters, who sometimes inspire our readers to realizations about their own lives.  But the obverse of writer's empathy is a sort of sociopathy that leads us to take a notebook to an aunt's funeral so we can jot down those telling details– the glint of the sun on the teak coffin, our uncle's fist closing hard around the stem of a lily and breaking it.

Only a sociopath, after all, could create people just to torture them with "conflict" and "motivation" and "poetic justice".  Only a sociopath could say, "I couldn't help it. I had to kill Joey off."  A sociopath... or a writer.

"There is a splinter of ice in the heart of a writer," Graham Greene remarked.  I think that is the paradox that ultimately makes us writers– the mix of warm beating love and icy determination.  But remember, the splinter pierces our heart first of all, and as long as we can feel that, experience the pain our characters experience, we will retain the humanity needed to imagine those inner voices into life, and make them become real for the "real people" who are our readers.

Strengths

I have a host of teaching weaknesses! But now I'm going to think of what I do well. I'm actually a good analyst, so my best teaching I think is done in writing. That is, I'm a better textbook writer than I am a classroom teacher. What I'm really good at is analyzing how a piece of writing works and how to make that happen in your own writing. So oddly enough, I'm best at a great distance (writing articles about writing, keeping the edittorrent blog about editing), or working very directly one-on-one with a writer. The f2F classroom has never been my metier, especially college classrooms where discussion is to be encouraged. I'm more a lecturer type (because I want to share all that analysis!) than a discussion-facilitator.

Anyway, I've sort of kept teaching until I happened into the two (opposing) situations I'm good at-- giving lectures about writing and plotting to large groups, and tutoring students directly in a writing center. (Also I do coaching of fiction writing on an ad hoc basis, and teach text-based email-list classes on various fiction-writing subjects, during which I always give way, way too much information and analysis, which annoys many students and delights (the best) some others. Also these classes are a way I create gobs of material that I use later to write books and booklets about these writing topics.)

So anyway, tonight I decided my greatest strength was not the analytical ability, or my enthusiasm about the rather arcane topics I teach. Rather it's... acceptance.

I was having dinner with my son, a newly commissioned military officer kicking his heels for a couple months before his next training assignment. He is, like so many of his generation, a serious gamer, but he's always been his mother's son and more fascinated by the stories than by the technology. We talk a lot about how this new medium allows for a different type of story, one with multiple protagonists, for example, where they don't all have to be brought together somehow in the end-- they can have separate experiences as the player will be able to "be" that person for the nonce.  He'd told me a few months ago about a post-apocalyptic story he had in his head, and tonight I mentioned that it seemed more suited to a videogame than to a novel for various reasons that made sense at the time-- his story is a road story, which is hardly unknown in fiction but would be more interesting in a game; he had a strong idea of the ending (endings are essential in fiction, I think... if there's no ending, there might be episodes but no story) but alternate paths to that-- again, a "game" advantage that would of necessity be trimmed in a novel.

Point is, I accepted it-- the story, the particular medium (gaming), and above all the acceptability of creating stories as a viable way to spend your time... and also the entire possibility that he could write this and it could be good. That I think is strangely enough my greatest strength. I exude, "You aren't insane. It's perfectly normal that you are preoccupied with these stories and these people who don't really exist. That's not crazy. It's cool."

I have actually been doing that much of my life. I sold my first novel when I was 22 (trust me, that was the very height of my brilliant career-- nothing like hitting your peak early to chasten you for life :), and so all along I've had credibility-- I'm just a normal person, and yet I write novels and have had some small success at it. There's nothing particularly exceptional or insane about me, so really, if I'm okay with it, if I think you've got as much chance as I do, then you can stop having that secret shame, you know, who the heck am I to think I can write a book?

That's my great gift. By accepting this as acceptable, I tell writers they're not crazy to write. I like to think that's really a good thing. :)

That doesn't of course mean that everyone I deal with is a good writer or will probably succeed. But I actually think almost anyone who wants to write probably can learn to write in some way. There are those who are already good at storytelling but might not be good at mechanics (these are the ones most likely to become pretty good fiction writers-- you can always hire an editor, and what you can't hire-- an imagination-- they already have). And there are those who are meticulous at mechanics but have little imagination (journalists are often this way), and might best apply their talents to something other than fiction, maybe-- but there's a huge world of genres and modes to choose from.

I've learned that if I read someone's story or outline and think, never in a million years, I better keep that to myself, first so as not to shut down their enthusiasm, but also because you can't really predict what combination of idea, hard work, and connections might cause a story to end up getting published or produced.

So what the heck. Deal with the writing as it comes to you. I once worked with a young writer who had apparently never noticed that chapters have many paragraphs-- every chapter was a single unbroken paragraph, and I don't mean in the Faulknerianly magisterial stream of consciousness way-- it was more a regular passage where the writer had forgotten to hit "enter" (I had "return" there and deleted it so you wouldn't realize I learned to type on a typewriter :) and "tab" occasionally. It was sort of breathtaking, and I remember thinking direly that anyone who has so little ability to absorb the conventions of written prose had little chance. But we soldier on. I said, as affirmatively as I could, that I wanted to show him how to paragraph, and we discussed where a little idea ended and a new one began, and then when one person stopped speaking and another started, and other places where a new paragraph might be useful. He thought this was fun, and pretty soon started incorporating paragraphs into his chapter. Once he did that, I could see that the helter-skelter pace that led him to rush through was actually the sign of a powerful engine of narrative propulsion-- a kind of exciting story. And wouldn't you know it, a few years later, his first book was bought by a major publisher (he did have paragraphs by then :), because that propulsiveness was actually the sign of a natural storyteller.

Anyway, since then I haven't written anyone off. Who knows what will combine to create a great story? I know that I have great training-- I know how plots work, and how sentences work, and even so, I never pull off the great story I should be capable of, given the expertise. (A natural teacher, perhaps-- the greatest teacher bar none I've ever had teaches screenplay writing, and has taught dozens of writers who later won awards, and yet hasn't ever had a big writing success of his own. That's me too, only I'm not that good a writing teacher.)

So. When I think of my greatest strength as a writing teacher, that's it. I don't think you're crazy to want to write. I think it's awesome, or at least perfectly normal. Let's go out to lunch and talk through your plot!
Alicia

Community of Practice

This paper will be about a writer's group a friend of mine belonged to. (I've been involved in fiction-writing groups for decades, so I have kind of a broad experience with the in-person kind, but not a lot with the online variety.) This writer (Jenny) and I have been friends-- actually, we met online! We were both in an online community back in the early 90s-- we were real pioneers. GEnie-- it had "roundtables" for romance writers (us), mystery writers, sf/f writers. I belonged to all of them as I wasn't sure what I'd end up writing (and what do you know, my first mystery novel, after 30 years! comes out next month, so I guess it worked). And as far as communities of practice, two of these roundtables-- Romex and SFFnet-- were by far ever the greatest discussions of popular genre fiction since, who knows, Dickens and Trollope were matching pints at the Old Cheshire on Fleet Street. Wow-- there's no record, of course, of all that incredible discussion, but I was in charge of several "topics" and remember how breathtaking it was-- mostly published authors talking very intensely about HOW they wrote, how they characterized, how they plotted.

Anyway, Jenny and I met there, but long after GEnie went the way of Lycos (so many corpses in this internet history), we stayed friends, visiting each other, emailing through major life traumas, all that. A long, long relationship. We're nothing alike-- she's a NY Jew, I'm a small town Catholic girl-- but we actually -- long before we met-- attended the same university (U of Chicago), years apart. She hated it, I loved it (it changed a lot in between).  Oddly enough. She lived in a commune, which was my dream when I was growing up in the tail end of the fun times, aka the 60s.

So... I got published very early-- my prose style has always been, if I  may say so, very graceful and always got me farther than I really deserved. So I had a Regency romance out in 1984 or so, when I was really young. And her first novel came out recently when she was 60! But she was always one of the most cogent commentators on how fiction worked, and she really just needed to wait until she found an editor that understood her work. Point is-- we were always in contact, always brainstorming plots. We had our own little community of practice. She recently sent me a compilation of all the emails we'd exchanged about the book that she eventually got published, and there, amidst all the book talk, were emails about our marriages and our kids (about the same age), and among other things, I realized that the kid I always thought of as an eternal source of worry was no worry then, and the "good kid" (as he still calls himself :) was angry at me all those years. Weird how the memory works, but can't argue with contemporaneous emails! And we were SO honest with each other, so I guess it was true, that the sweet son was really sour.And I might owe the other one an apology for remembering him as so difficult!

At some point, Jenny joined this group centered in the UK, I think (online, I mean), where she hoped to regain that Genie level of discussion. I think the group wasn't like that, but was much more interactive, focused on critiquing rather than discussion-- that is, participants post their chapters and others give helpful comments. After a couple years on this site, she sold her book, and I've always thought maybe this was a really successful group as she told me about others who sold their books after participating in this group. So I thought recently I'd write about this (as I'd have some distance -- it's not my group), but now she tells me that the group got all commercial and those who really connected and wrote well withdrew and work together but outside the group. (I don't know the details yet.) One of the problems we're seeing a lot with online groups is that they start more or less as voluntary groups with one leader or a few leaders, and then as it becomes successful, everyone thinks, "Facebook!" and there's an attempt to cash in. I don't blame them, but "monetizing" a group so often ruins it (cf. Goodreads) as the purpose of the group stops being whatever and starts being "making a profit" or "selling a service" or "attracting more members".

We'll see. I'll interview her and go there and actually join the group and check it out.

I keep running into the kind of ethical issues I never had when working on my thesis about Edgar Allan Poe (long dead guy, that is). Even blogging here about my sons (who are both grown and wonderful men, btw) feels like it could be a bit unethical. But writing about my friend and her colleagues at Authonomy-- hmm. I'm not used to that. I do write about my students sometimes, but I'm careful to disguise the situation (like changing "her" to "him") enough that I don't know they'd even realize I was writing about them. And I'm not writing about THEM but the writing/teaching/editing situation.

Best practices

Thinking of that best practices memo.

Thinking of doing the Best Practices assignment about the writing center where I work, though I'm going to narrow the topic down to just the language of the materials (comparing negative constructions: Two things you must avoid... Don't do this.... with positive constructions-- Here are two things you should try to achieve... and Try this) and the possible use of student focus groups to assess which gets the better response from students. 

I'll say (thinking out loud here), that this offers twin benefits, one that we get information on student responses, and two that this could be the basis of research, like someone could write an article on using focus groups in the writing center. 

One of the problems that comes with the good thing of having lots of work is that we are not encouraged to take time to do research, though there are wonderful research possibilities primarily in the area of "what helps students learn whatever." We have such good opportunity to observe what works and what doesn't or in what situation some policy helps or doesn't. But there's no time to stop and think or even make note of what we've just experienced. There's always another week starting with four more new classes. It's such a missed opportunity. This is a good reason to consider writing center advisors "faculty," however low-level (I've always been adjunct in my teaching, so I know how low the levels can go). We're "staff" which is good for practical reasons (we are actual employees, not semester-by-semester adjuncts), but "staff" suggests that what we do has some administrative function. And in fact, we're teachers. We teach in a limited way, a week at a time, one particular assignment, and only the writing aspects, but it's still teaching. We function as visiting faculty. As faculty, we would not be thought weird if we said we'd like to do research. But "staff" doing research? Absurd! 

I've worked in writing centers since about 1991, when they were becoming widespread, and I think there was a decision made back then, for whatever reason, that writing centers were not going to be part of the faculty but part of the administration. (Probably this was about funding!)  Libraries, notice, went the other way-- librarians are often considered part of the faculty, get tenure, etc.  I wish I knew more about this. It does seem like more than just the whole administration-octopus evolution, that pretty soon 90% of the university will be "administration," and there'll be more administrators in a department than teachers.... but rather some decision that if the program can't be assigned to an academic discipline, it's "administration." A lot of writing centers are in the "Writing Program", and some are under that big administrative "Student advising" section. The one I taught at when I started was under the Liberal Arts dean, though we worked with all students.

I should ask the WCenter list about this-- is WC administration or faculty?

Alicia

Non-traditional assignments

I teach writing and work in a writing center, so I am, of course, quite comfortable with what a colleague dismissively calls "alphabet soup." (He means words and sentences. Groan.) I might argue that "writing" is more important than ever in some ways-- it still amazes me that young people would rather text than talk on the phone, but I'd rather email than talk on the phone, and I'd probably text if I didn't have really clumsy thumbs and lamentably good touch-typing (ALL fingers) habits. There's something about the distance afforded by that alphabet soup, the a-synchronicity of it, the postponement of interaction, that makes it perpetually appealing.

Anyway, in my advising work, I'm placed in different online classrooms every week to help the students with their writing assignments. What this affords me is a quite broad view of how online courses are being conducted in different disciplines and across different levels. (I'm mostly in the undergraduate courses, and mostly upper-level these days.) And something I've been noticing is that a couple years ago, there was a marked tendency to offer students a choice of assignments, one choice being traditional (usually a research paper), and one being non-traditional (usually something more visual-- a Powerpoint, a video, a recording of the student doing a speech). In my own classes, word came down from the department that we too were supposed to offer students the choice between the usual discussion forum posts and "a PowerPoint presentation or Youtube video answering the prompt."

It was a resounding failure. In my own classes, no one went to the trouble of creating a Powerpoint to answer a discussion forum prompt. And while two did choose to make videos instead of the final paper-- thinking it would be easier-- ended up with unimpressive products which didn't fulfill any of the research and analysis part of the "researched analysis project" project. So while they probably enjoyed the 45 minutes they spent on their films, they didn't like the grades they got and complained. I sympathized, but really, it's hard to look at a 20-page research paper with 15 sources and then at a 6-minute video of nature photographs set to a emo soundtrack with 35 words of captioning and think they deserve the same grade.

This year I've noticed that none of those courses that two years ago offered alternatives to writing a paper are still doing it. The end project of all the classes is back to being some arrangement of alphabet soup. (Of course, I'm a writing advisor, so I'm not placed in courses where there's no writing project.)

Why? I'm glad of it really. I think it's certainly possible for students to do effective jobs with other media, but they probably haven't been taught those skills academically. And the resources it takes to, say, do a documentary film about the failure of the bondrating agencies in the 2008 bank crisis simply aren't available to most students the way the library and their word-processor are-- it's not just easier to write a research paper. It's -possible--, achievable, to students. The same level of video products simply is not, no matter how many free apps are out there.

That's one of the problems-- it's easy to do these alternatives badly, and hard to do them well. And no one's really teaching the students to do these things.  Powerpoint's been around forever-- I remember my now-grown kids doing Powerpoints in grade school-- and it's useful enough. I use it occasionally in my other job (I do writing workshops around the country), but not all that much because of the lighting (you turn the lights down, and workshoppers can't read their own work) and because of the tendency to read off the darned slides rather than actually teaching.  But there's this assumption that Powerpoint is so intuitive that students will just pick it up and do it well, like they do with Tumblr or Pinterest. And I don't think it works that way, and anyway, the medium is NOT the message-- there still has to be content. Research. Ideas.

One problem is that there is no purpose being defined usually, and no audience, so there's no real way of getting an idea of what is needed, what will be sufficient, what level of information is needed, how deep the analysis. "Do a video about a problem and solution" tends to get really basic topics like "how to train your dog to beg." Just the tradition of the research paper is enough to steer students away from thinking they can get away with that in text.

I'm not sold on the idea that other-media assignments can be assigned and assessed on the same plane as a research paper. But I think the first step is deciding that the alternative assignment must be as well-thought out and useful as the research paper is. It's not enough that it's a video or a Powerpoint-- it has to be that because this is the best way to present this material. And also, all the academic standards still have to be established and met. If this is a research project, the alternative assignment must require the same level of research. If it's supposed to be analytical, there must be some development and logic involved.

Over and over, we keep making this mistake-- treating alternatives as just tricks, gimmicks, assuming multimedia is good simply for multimedia's stake. Like a talking dog-- just worthwhile in and of itself.  But it's not. It's a medium. It's just pixels on screen unless something intervenes and makes it more meaningful. The content, the organization, the focus, the research, all still have to be there. After all, the point of research paper assignments, even writing assignments, isn't to teach students how to type. And the purpose of alternative-media assignments shouldn't be just to teach them how to Youtube.

We're simultaneously trivializing and deifying "the alternative"-- showing it too much fear and not enough respect.

I think I might deal with this in my constructivist assignment.