Badger Basketball: Good into the Future!

So I thought I’d take the opportunity with this open blog post to discuss the Badger Basketball team! Now this year is going very well despite recent troubles, and we are a legitimate Final Four contender. Alando Tucker is the obvious pick for Big 10 Player of the Year, and probably the #2 guy in the National Player of the Year discussion. In my opinion, Wisconsin should beat Michigan State on Saturday, and then if they win their first 2 games of the Big 10 Tournament, they are a solid #1 seed in the NCAA Tournament. It will probably take an Ohio State loss at Michigan Saturday, or an early exit from the conference tournament to get Wisconsin the St. Louis regional #1 seed, which would give us better location in the tournament.

Anyhow, what I really wanted to talk about was next year because I have heard from a few people about how we won’t be the same next year. I will agree that we won’t be an elite top 5 team to start next year. But I feel we will be an NCAA lock team that stays in the top 20 all year with the possibility of turning into a top 5 team again! Now I don’t expect anyone to just take my word on this, you probably want some sort of evidence for this. Well here it comes!

As far as big men go, Wisconsin will be absolutely solid next year with Butch and Stiemsma the probable starters. Both will be senior leaders and with Butch’s growing scoring and rebounding ability added with Stiemsma’s defensive prowess, plus his nice 15 ft. jumper, they will be a force to be reckoned with in the paint. Losing Chappell is still a loss but he is not as good as the other two anyhow, and we will have redshirt-freshman J.P. Gavinski that could add some valuable playing time as well.

As far as the guard position goes, we will be arguably better than this year even though we lose Taylor. Taylor is a good player but is not the greatest ball handler and as seen at Ohio State Sunday, is not the senior leader he should be. We keep Flowers as a fantastic defensive guard and his scoring will only keep improving. On top of Flowers we will have the sophomores in Hughes and Bohannon that between them will be able to more than make up for Taylor’s contributions. Hughes is an amazing ball handler and can run the point very effectively. Bohannon has the sweetest outside shot on the team, and I could definitely see him as a Drew Neitzel-like guy for this team as he progresses. As both of them get better defensively and get more comfortable with their increased roles, I don’t see scoring from the guard position as a problem. The more Bohannon drains the three, the less zone defense will give us problems which is an achilles heel this year to some degree.

Now, the big question is how do you replace Alando Tucker in the forward slot when he is clearly the best player in the entire conference? My answer is simple, you don’t. But just like when Devin Harris left, Tucker was waiting in the wings and we have Landry doing that now. His athleticism is comparable to Tucker’s; he has an inch or two on him in height, and has better shot-blocking skills. Landry won’t be Tucker next year, but he can definitely be a top 5 Big 10 player averaging 15-20 points per game and by his senior year could be as good as Tucker is this year. Krabbenhoft and Gullikson are very solid contributors as well that will help burden the load in Tucker’s absence. Krabbenhoft in particular is the best hustle player on the team, and should see a few starts depending on the other team’s starting lineup.

Overall, the starting 5 will be hard to determine exactly and may switch more often than this year, but my best guess is as follows:

Brian Butch

Greg Stiemsma

Marcus Landry

Michael Flowers

Jason Bohannon

Our bench should consist of at least 4 regular contributors, which mean we will be a very deep team again, making it hard to outplay us for 40 minutes. These will be our main bench contributors:

Joe Krabbenhoft

Kevin Gullikson

Trevon Hughes

J.P. Gavinski

Also, looking at this Rivals.com page about our next year Freshman class, we will be adding 4 more players, two 4 star prospects and two 3 star prospects, so there is a great chance that a few of those players will see some playing time and contribute to make us even deeper! With 3 seniors starting, we will again be a veteran team that has a deep bench, good young players as a supporting cast, and as always, an underrated coach in Bo Ryan! I just cannot see a big drop-off from this year, and if the pieces fall right there is no reason we don’t end up as a top 5 team threatening for a #1 seed again! Let me know what you think about next year’s team.

Networks Are Taking Over!

For last Tuesday we read a very confusing few chapters by Katherine Hayles called “Writing Machines”. Though it was a confusing text, after discussing it I feel that I agree more with her than with McLuhan’s idea. In my mind, it does not seem like she is willing to bracket content or a message completely separate of the medium, like McLuhan does. Yet she does state “the physical form of the literary artifact always affects what the words (and other semiotic components) mean” (Hayles 25). Though it is definitely insinuating that the medium, probably a book in this case, affects the message, it is not going as far as to say that the medium is the only thing of significance. I agree that the way material is presented absolutely shapes the message it gives; such as if a book has a certain font, it can contribute to making some rhetorical argument. Therefore, it is shaping the message, but it does not necessarily mean the text is unimportant either.

Hayles text also analyzes Talan Memmott’s Lexia to Perplexia, which is a controlled chaos of an online adventure. I think the most important point from it is that it is made to intentionally be confusing and not make sense to a viewer. I believe that if each person in our class tried to define some of the things in it, we’d get 18 different answers, which speaks to the fact that there are multiple interpretations. The variety of meanings that can be made out of it helps to argue a point that there may not be one single meaning to most texts. All too often in high school English classes, we were essentially coached into one interpretation of a book passage or a poem. Memmott uses new technology to showcase a view that it is not always the case, and furthermore show how new media like the internet allows for even more interpretations. This really sets up arguments for those like Jeff Rice and how not only new media needs to become important in college English, but that there may be a whole new level of analysis that needs to be applied to much of it.

The other reading we read was from Mark Taylor’s book “The Moment of Complexity”, and highlighted an introduction to chaos and complexity. I think Taylor made an argument that technology brings about more information to networks and that we are now living in a web environment. An example from the text is the collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989, which marked a “decisive juncture in the formation of network culture...” (Taylor 20). Prior to that event, the world was stuck largely in the Cold War attitudes that were rigidly fixed, and in many ways represented a grid. After the event, globalization took off to a new level and has allowed for the networks and webs that now dominate the global culture.

In Thursday’s class, we didn’t quite get to talking about the 6^th discussion question, about what writing is, but I think it’s a fantastic discussion topic. In relation to Taylor’s text, I feel that most writing is representative of a grid and not a network. Without a doubt, the typical print type of writing follows an assembly line format of writing, editing, revising, and so forth. It is very structured and does not typically allow for much collaboration, which is one of the main characteristics of a network. Other types of writing such as a blog or Wikipedia give more gray area to writing. In some ways blogs create a very structured way to put down content, and in the same way so does Wikipedia. If you look at a Wikipedia entry about Boston, and you look at one about Madison, you’ll notice they are structured nearly the exact same. Yet, on the other hand there are a huge variety of types of things one could put into a blog such as video, photos, text, or music. Also, you can link to millions of other people through these types of media, which is practically the definition of a network. So I think that one could say a lot of writing is grid-like, but there are certainly network aspects to writing, mostly of the new media type.

A key point though across all of these texts is the clear presence of the new media in our society, and the growing network culture, which we currently inhabit. In many ways, this is all very new and we have to learn a lot about how networks work to better understand them and much of the new types of writing.

Chaos Theory and March Madness?!

I was reading up articles on ESPN this afternoon and came across a Men's Basketball podcast that mentions chaos theory in a bit of detail actually. Go here and if you scroll down along the left side, there is an article about the game between Wisconsin and Ohio State titled "One on One". Though I encourage reading that, if you look underneath it, there is a link to a podcast about the chaos theory. You only need to listen for the first few minutes to hear them relate it to March Madness, and then for you listening pleasure, they talk about the Badger game tomorrow for 5 minutes or so. Just thought I'd share!

Dreamweaver Class!!!

On Thursday evening at 6:30pm, in B207 Computer Sciences I took the Dreamweaver 1 class by STS. I must say that it was a fantastic experience. The thing that really took me by surprise were the variety of people taking it. Kurt was actually in the class, but so were at least 3 or 4 PhD students, a special student who was at least 45, and some undergrads in a plethora of majors. I guess it just goes to show how everyone has an interest in the internet and making websites these days. Anyhow, the class was great even though some of the super basics, such as defining a site, were already covered in our class. It made for good review, but we also learned a few new things. As for linking, we learned not only how to do a "Back to Top" link, we also learned how to make links open in different windows. On top of that, we learned about CSS as a way to style your website after the content is already there, and during that I figured out how to put background images on my page. Also we learned how to put mp3 and various other documents on the page and place them in nice table formats. I think I may have been able to figure that out anyhow but it was nice to know exactly how it is done. Overall I'd say the class was 80% good review, and 20% new things.

As for using what I've learned for the projects in the class, I feel that I now have a few more basic tools to shape my websites. This will in turn allow for better representation of the rhetorical ideas I'm trying to make on a given website. For instance, being able to add background images or insert different types of media like .mp3 or word documents will enhance the messages I'm trying to get across. Dreamweaver 1 was such a good class, I can only hope I can find time in my schedule to take more classes. I'd love to finish the Dreamweaver series and also take the CSS series so at that point I'd be able to make some pretty sophisticated websites that would be able to make any argument I wish.

If you haven't taken a class yet, I can't recommend them enough!

A Medium Is Useless Without a Message!

When reading Marshall McLuhan’s “Understanding Media”, it is safe to say that I had no idea what he was really getting at originally. Then after our class discussion about it on Tuesday, I had a better idea of what he was trying to say, although I must say I tend to disagree with him. Much of what I will say is similar to what I just read in Kate’s blog, but I too think that without a message there would be no use for a medium.

In the first chapter we read of McLuhan, he stated the “medium is the message”, and I took this as meaning that the medium is the way which content is delivered, so it is what is important. The medium is the act of getting a message across, so using a movie as an example; the medium would be the entire filmmaking process. The actual content of the movie would be the message. I do not have any problems with the distinction between the two, and I actually think he makes good sense in how he characterizes them. Yet, he tends to separate them, insinuating that message is of little importance, and it is only the medium that matters. I think in one way he is right, which is that one person’s blog may be a message that has absolutely no significance when compared to the idea of the internet as a medium. Yet, there are two reasons why I feel he is incorrect. First, most messages probably are not significant in and of themselves, but the fact there are messages out there to begin with makes the medium have usefulness. Secondly, sometimes the message is very significant. I have two examples, the first being McLuhan’s example of the railroads and how the “content of the railway medium” (24) was insignificant. One of the main things railways carried was coal, and while that may not have been significant at the time, it is now a major issue with fossil fuels and global warming. So the content being coal was very important in that situation in what it has done to the environment and economy. A second example would be Martin Luther King Jr.’s speech “I Have a Dream”. By my understanding, McLuhan would say that the speech’s content is unimportant, but the act of speaking and giving speeches is the important part. I agree that the speechmaking process is important and is necessary for quality speeches to occur, but without the quality speeches themselves, then the process would have little importance.

The second part of McLuhan’s reading was about the hot and cold media and the differences between the two. From the reading and class discussion, a hot medium is one that has low participation, high definition and more information whereas a cool medium has high participation, low definition, and less information. McLuhan categorized many media into one or the other, and the main problem I had with this is that you can only compare two media at a time. When comparing radio versus a telephone, it makes perfect sense that a telephone would be the cold medium and radio the hot since a telephone gives you less information and definition while requiring a much higher level of participation. Yet that should not make radio a hot medium in my eyes because you could compare it to a movie, which I would argue requires even less participation and gives you much more information. So when comparing those two, radio would be a cold medium. I think there should be a gradient used where one end is the hottest medium and the other is the coldest medium, because the lines are not very clear-cut. This was obvious when the class discussion covered the idea of TV as being a cold medium, which I feel may have been a product of McLuhan’s time but also that it may be cold in comparison to some other forms of media, but hotter than other ones.

I do think McLuhan makes some very interesting arguments but the “medium is the message” idea is a little too out there for me. He does show how important the medium is though, and that should not be ignored. Without media, we would have no messages but in the same sense, without messages, we’d have no use for the media. I definitely feel the two are intertwined and cannot be separated out completely.

Connections Across Disciplines

In response to exercise #4 on page 22 in Writing About Cool, by Jeff Rice, it should be noted that I am taking 5 classes. I am taking a Biochemistry, Physics, Bacteriology, Environmental Studies, and English class this semester. As the exercise requires ideas, words, or concepts between the classes that have come up in them, I found it very difficult to find good examples that cross the Science-English barrier, while many concepts are shared between one or all of the science courses I’m taking.

The best example I could think of are the words culture and media. In our class, we discuss culture as a way of life and media in terms of ways to express information. Primarily used in my bacteriology course, culture refers to growing bacterial cultures in a laboratory setting, although media can refer to a collection of information which is found in these cultures, so a similar definition.

Another example I thought of is the word hormones, which is used most often in my biochemistry class as far as potent biological signaling molecules. It is also used in this nature in my bacteriology course, and was discussed as a potential water pollutant in my Environment course. A system similar to hormones is neurotransmitters, which was discussed in physics in terms of the magnetic fields it creates in our brains. I do not think the word has ever come up in our class, but it can certainly be related to the text Writing About Cool. Many times the expression “raging hormones” refers to teenagers when they are growing up. Teenagers have a different set of values, which makes them react to a different language such as words like “cool” and “suck”. So even though it is not a direct usage, the idea of hormones controlling our bodies is present even in English.

Lastly, there is a pervading theme I have noticed this year throughout all of my courses, which is the idea of change. We’ve encountered it in almost every class period and reading in this course with regards to blogging and the new forms of media that are emerging. It has also been made obvious to me in courses like biochemistry, where just yesterday our professor admitted that the slide he showed was outdated because the actual structure of the enzyme had been solved within the last few months. In similar ways, all my classes have been emphasizing that what we learn this semester will not all be true next semester, or many semesters from now for that matter.

A New Genre: Blogging!

In response to last Thursday’s reading, “Blogging as Social Action: A Genre Analysis of the Weblog” by Carolyn Miller and Dawn Shepherd, I think there are some very interesting aspects to the idea of blogging as a whole. Though it was confusing at first, the idea of blogging as a kairos made interesting insight into the genre that is blogging. As defined in the reading, kairos is “socially perceived space-time” (Shepherd 2), but the example Scot gave in class about how you know what to expect during a eulogy was more helpful. From that discussion, I think blogging came about as a genre because it was the right time in history for it to happen, and it filled some void that came about through the advancing technology.

One of the group discussion questions was #5, which said how the reading concludes that blogging’s exigence lies in the blogger’s need to cultivate and validate a sense of self online. Although I do agree with this I certainly do not feel it is the only reason people blog in the first place. Through our group’s discussion, I feel as though there are four main reasons someone begins to blog, and the most common is indeed the notion of self-expression. People want to “be heard” and there is no better place to do that than online, where anyone with internet access in the world can “hear” you. However, some people may blog but not let anyone see their blog, so there’s no way the first reason can be applied to that case. I would say that people that write a blog for only their own eyes are expressing their feelings, thoughts, opinions, or whatever they want to themselves. It is really no different than a diary then, except instead of writing by hand, they are using a computer. A third reason I believe people blog is to feel like a part of a community, and that this plays a large role in making people blog as well. Blogging allows people from different generations to come together as one, so older people can feel like part of the “in” crowd again. Lastly, I believe people blog because they are bored. As mentioned in the article, there was a blog that was a complete hoax about a girl with cancer, and I cannot imagine any other reason someone would do that except that they did not really have anything better to do with their time. For all of these reasons, blogging exists in today’s culture and allows these “voids” people have to be filled.

The other very interesting discussion question was #6, with regards to Jeff Rice’s arguments from the reading, “What Should College English Be”. He mentions “the space on the page keeps bodies of information (and, thus, bodies) separate” (Rice 130). In space on the page, he is referring to the normal print writing, encompassing mostly academic writing and paragraph essays. I think this makes an interesting liaison to blogs in that blogs are certainly not “space on the page”, but a newer media and genre. They certainly do not keep bodies of information separate in the least, but actually bring vast amounts of information together in one place. Yet, I think many social network writing actually keep bodies separate, much like the “space on the page” writing does. It’s much less likely that you’ll make a point to see your high school friends when you’re in town if you’ve been writing to them on Facebook or AIM compared to if it had been a really long time since you’ve talked. I also feel that though the academic writing does keep people separate from distant places, it can bring people together that are nearby in collaboration on some writing, whereas you may never bother collaborating or talking with anyone when writing things on your blog. Of course, you may be collaborating online through comments, but again this is bringing the information together, and keeping the bodies separate.

I feel that this can be a dangerous idea because no matter how useful new media can be, there is no substitute for being able to talk to people directly in person. Most jobs are interacting with people, and if it becomes too common for people to share all their ideas online through all the various networks, they may lose their ability to properly interact in person.

New Media Should Be The New Way!

When thinking of academic writing, I think it is safe to say that it is referring to writing done in school or in general academia. The audience for academic writing is typically teachers, professors, researchers, and other students. The most common type of academic writing would probably be the 5-paragraph writing that was first introduced to me in the 9th grade. However, academic writing is more about thesis statements, topic sentences, solid conclusions, and good grammar throughout. And while it can take form as the 5-paragraph essay or a 20-page scientific research paper, it typically does not allow for a ton of creativity or excitement.

In contrast, new media is abundant in creativity and excitement. New media includes the internet, text messaging, making movies, cell phones, and blogging. All of these types of media are very different from academic writing. They typically can be used without any strict formatting, and can convey almost anything imaginable in any way you could possibly want to convey something. That is the way that new media challenges the concepts of academic writing. Why should someone write an essay with pen and paper following academic rules to convey a message that would be conveyed even better using iMovie? I think the way that new media challenges the academic writing outline the most is that new media changes so fast. Only 5 years ago or so, PowerPoint was possibly the main new media that needed to find it’s way into curriculum, but today it’s only the tip of the iceberg.

Some benefits of including new media into an English curriculum would be to better prepare students for the types of media they will encounter in the “real world”. It’s very rare for people to write a single 5-paragraph essay once they have jobs, but it is very common to have people use PowerPoint to convey ideas. People are encountering blogs in almost every area, and use of the internet is nearly a prerequisite in today’s age. By including forms of new media into English curriculum, students would have a leg up on these important forms of media. From my experience in the sciences, I have noticed that poster sessions are frequently used to convey research you are doing, instead of having everyone read your paper. This is just another example of how using computers to construct posters to convey ideas would be beneficial to know how to do.

However, there are definitely a few drawbacks to incorporation of new media into the curriculum. For one, there is no doubt some importance to the academic writing of old, and many would be concerned that it would fall to the wayside. Also, new media changes so often that it would be difficult to stay on top of the changes, if not impossible. Possibly the worst consequence was discussed in class last Thursday, which would be that some people would gain a further advantage over others. This would happen because not everyone actually does have access to a computer, so some schools would not be able to provide students a curriculum of new media whereas other schools would be able to do a great job. A large divide could occur which would certainly unfairly advantage some groups of people over others.

Academic writing is not unimportant, but it is not necessarily always as useful as certain new media. I think we need to include more and more types of new media into classrooms to prepare students for what they will encounter in the “real world”.

What is Writing?

Wikipedia: Good or Bad?

For Thursday’s class we had to read two articles, one titled “Rhetorics Fast and Slow” by Lester Faigley, and a second titled “Made Not Only in Words” by Kathleen Blake Yancey. In addition to these, a third article read during Thursday’s class titled, “A Stand Against Wikipedia” by Scott Jaschik, discusses how Middlebury College has collectively stood against Wikipedia by not allowing students to use it as a citation. A quote from the article made by the chair of the history department at Middlebury, Don Wyatt, is “Even though Wikipedia may have some value, particularly from the value of leading students to citable sources, it is not itself an appropriate source for citation”. Thursday’s discussion over this article seemed to more or less agree with this quote, but to varying degrees. Most students unified around the response that Wikipedia is indeed not a citable source but a good starting point, so the “ban” on Wikipedia should be clearer as far as how it can be used.

I personally do not feel Wikipedia should ever be cited in a research paper of any kind, but this would have nothing to do with the fact that it is an internet source. As discussed by some students in class, encyclopedias of any nature are never suitable as citable sources in a research paper. Papers of this nature should always use original sources, which essentially excludes all encyclopedias or any reference type material. However, there is nothing wrong with using it as a starting point, to get background information on a topic or to find some other original sources using the bibliography on the page. If you use it only as a starting point and not as a citation, there would be no way a faculty member could ever know you went on to it anyhow, so the point is moot.

A more interesting point of discussion though was why the ban at Middlebury focused solely on Wikipedia, a newer type of media, and not any reference book such as an encyclopedia from the library. I think it definitely has to do with the fact Wikipedia is a newer technology, and everyone can be resistant to change. As Faigley would call it, Wikipedia is a fast rhetoric whereas a book may be more of a slow rhetoric. “Speed brings risks” (Faigley 7) and I think that is why faculty are wary of something like Wikipedia more so than any old encyclopedia. They probably feel like it’s more likely you will make a silly mistake in quality or factual information by using a quicker mode like the internet than if you go through the library and look through books. I would tend to agree with this, but there is a main problem. That problem is that the world is moving forward, “Fast rhetorics dominate our world” (Faigley 4), and not recognizing that print is an old medium that will slowly be used less and less in new curriculum (Yancey 28).

If a student of Yancey’s cited Wikipedia, I believe that she would view it as a learning opportunity. She would probably show the student how to use Wikipedia as an excellent beginning source of knowledge, but not as the final source. In doing this, she would be using a viewpoint that the new media of the internet is to be embraced, though we must teach students how to use it correctly. If that same student was instead a student of Faigley’s, I believe he would look down about the use more so than Yancey. He believes fast rhetorics, such as cell phones, the internet, and email, are causing a noticeable decline in quality (Faigley 4). I think he is absolutely correct, but it is because the fast rhetorics are currently going untouched by people that could teach how to properly use some of it, such as English teachers. New technology which is shaping the lives of young people should be taught in schools, teaching students how to properly use it so problems that are being encountered at schools like Middlebury College will not be happening in the future.