Sunday, October 15, 2006

More on TYCA

Last night's post was way too brief, and I have been thinking more about the wonderful experience yesterday at the TYCA conference. Michael's blog post captures quite a bit of the flavor of the event, so please check that out. I do hope that participants keep commenting on the TYCA blog.

Bradley Bleck from Spokane Falls CC has been a great inspiration for us, and his recent post about Blackboard CMS versus blogging was a good addition to material we already gathered to share with participants who wanted to know some reasons why blogging might be better.

As part of today's post-conference rest and reflection, I was very happy to get an email quickly from Tom Cameron at Olympic College who shared the excellent grid he has designed to teach students how to evaluate their level of communication in a paper, from writer based to reader based. He graciously gave permission, and sent an electronic copy which I plan to use in my Argument class tomorrow.

Not only is Cameron's "Communications Essentials" scale easy to follow, but I happen to like taxonomies as being a clear way to make sense of things, even if, as Kenneth Burke says,
"Men seek for vocabularies that are reflections of reality. To this end, they must develop vocabularies that are selections of reality. And any selection of reality must, in certain circumstances, function as a deflection of reality. " I don't recall where in Burke's work this is from, but I got the quote from a web page with the tacky name of Brainy Quotes (it's the sort of place I hope my students don't use!).

When searching with Google for a good link for that quote, I found this article about Kenneth Burke by one of the English department professors emeriti, Bob Wess, a very pleasant man whom I pass in the halls around 5 PM and see in the printer room we all share. Wess has studied Burke for years and is probably the preeminent Burke scholar.

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