This morning, I prepared my class, went downstairs to my 10:30 class at about 10:25, ready to set up some web things. I got to the door, and the whole class was there (all but one or two, itself quite remarkable at this time in the term), lights dimmed, watching the student scheduled for one of the presentations that day _doing_ his presentation. Everyone was listening intently, laughing in all the right places.

It was all a bit “wtf” but I thought, oh, maybe he’s been telling them about his play (this is the scriptwriting class) and they wanted to hear it (I know, that doesn’t make a lot of sense, but…). Anyway, when he was finished, I walked in, took my place at the computer terminal and started setting up. I looked at them, looked at the clock, and said “I’m not late… ?”

Uh. Yeah. I was. The class started at 10:00. I don’t even have the excuse that I was an HOUR late because of the time change. I just got muddled, because all my other classes start on the half hour, and I think I conflated this one with another one later in the week. And this one has a silly schedule that’s different on Mondays than it is on Wednesdays. And I’m tired, and a bit depressed, and my brain is fuzzy.

But – HEY YOU GUYS!! They were carrying on the class without me! How cool is THAT! They were engaged, responsible, and participating. Wow.

They could have walked out. And if I’d walked in, 25 minutes late, to find one person there to tell me they’d done that, I think I would have gone and jumped off a bridge. Instead, they give me this gift.

Oh, and we’re reading Firefly episode 5, “Out of Gas,” and someone in the class was wearing a cunning hat. How cool is that?

I did not realize that we would also in a small way be carrying the flag for freedom of speech.

My students post their blogs in LiveJournal. LJ is the blog I learned to use first – when I started blogging six or seven years ago, LJ was the “cool” blogging platform. Now the cool kids are on Tumblr and the “real” bloggers are on WordPress, and when LiveJournal got “sold to the Russians” a whole lot of people jumped ship to DreamWidth, an LJ clone, or at least set up mirror blogs there. But there’s still a core group of loyal LJ users: writers, artists, members of various fandoms, interesting people. My friends are there.

I put my students there because it is dead easy to use, free, and, when I first started doing this, advertisement and spam-free. Sadly, those last things are no longer true. The ads have come in the way ads have come on almost all the social software sites these days. And the spam has grown along with a huge and mysterious user base of … Russians. Which brings me to the Kremlin.

Over the last couple of weeks, LJ has been down a lot of the time. People complained, muttered, set up DreamWidth blogs, muttered some more. And LJ announced that it was fighting denial of service attacks. And we all thought “huh – serves them right for starting those stupid games, trying to be like Facebook.” And then we heard that it was likely that the ddos attacks were coming from the Kremlin, and everyone’s attitude changed.

Apparently, LJ is not only the most popular blogging platform in Russia, it’s the only blogging platform in Russia. And it’s being used not only by a bunch of Russian teenagers writing about Twilight but by those who would speak out against the mass corruption in the Russian government.

That’s why it’s under attack.

And that’s why we need to keep using it, help keep free speech alive.

And if one of my students is late with a post? What a perfect excuse!

I have to admit, that techie person that I am, early adopter of many things, blogger, twitterer, online teacher, I am still not 100% convinced by this little device, though it has many advantages.

One thing I love about it, and what will keep me using it, is being able to buy books still only available in hardcover (like A Discovery of Witches) for paperback prices. And getting them instantly via wireless delivery. That is very cool. I like being able to sit in my armchair with a mug of soup in one hand, a spoon or some bread in the other, and my book “open” and available to read easily. I am thrilled by its potential for travel – imagine being able to take as many books with you as you can actually read on a trip!

I like the idea of, although so far have not taken advantage of, the ability to synch whatever book I am reading on my various electronic devices. I suspect this works better in theory than in practice, as you would have to remember to synch things constantly in order to read on one device at breakfast, another on the bus and another on your laptop without losing your place.

I don’t like not being able easily to skim quickly or skip through a book or article. I am far more likely, in consequence, to use my Kobo to read novels than to use it for research. I am skeptical, therefore, about its uses for education. I wish there was a way to annotate with it.

So the jury is still out, or at least I can easily see it for me as one more device, something with particular uses, not something that is going to replace “real” books, any more than iPods have replaced stereo systems. I continue to await developments, though.

And now she is gone.

That she was loved by many is attested to by the outpouring of tributes and expressions of grief all over the blogosphere and the internets. She even trended on Twitter yesterday (and would have been highly amused, I’m sure). No doubt, there will have been many on Facebook and Twitter and elsewhere scratching their heads, wondering “who the heck is Diana Wynne Jones”? She was not well enough known. Mention Howl’s Moving Castle and more will have seen Miyazaki’s movie than read the book. Mention a school for wizards, and everyone with think “Hogwarts,” though DWJ created Chrestomanci castle many years earlier. Those of us who love and admire her work gnash our teeth at the popularity of a certain JKR or the books about sparkly vampires, when DWJ has been writing richer, funnier, more literate and just plain better books for so long. It took the popularity of JKR to bring DWJ’s books back into print. But back into print they are, and she will live on in her words.

And what words they are. What books. So many! Not all equally great, but even her weakest books are worth reading. And her strongest are … oh, so good.

Everyone at the conference agreed that Diana Wynne Jones writes books for intelligent people. They challenge you. They make you think. They are inventive, and original and can be tricky. But they are exciting and often hilariously funny.

She writes about strong children and weak adults. She writes about how easy it can be to lose your identity and sense of self-worth when everyone around you is preoccupied with other business and no one cares about your feelings. She writes about the importance of independent thinking and self-reliance. She writes about reading, and writing and the power of the imagination and of words. She writes about power, and vanity, and getting things wrong, and making things right, and responsibility. She writes about girls and she writes about boys and she writes about wizards and griffins and a fire demon and a goon and dogs and cats, and every single one has more character in his or her or its little finger than many other author’s characters put together (JKR, I’m talking about you).

One of my favourite little moments in DWJ’s books comes in The Ogre Downstairs, an early domestic fantasy, already demonstrating how delightful and original her work could be. It’s about a newly blended family of children who hate each other, and the “ogre” who is stepfather to half of them, and who are brought together through misadventure with a magical chemistry set filled with mysterious (but entirely logical) ingredients that do things like give the power to fly and bring inanimate objects to life. One of the ingredients is labelled dens drac. (dragon’s teeth). Remember the myth of Jason and the Argonauts? And the dragon’s teeth that when scattered on the ground spring to life as fully armed soldiers? When the children drop these on the driveway of their house, a motor-cycle gang springs up, speaking Greek. Written in Greek. And if you happen to know Greek, there’s a wonderful inside joke, because it’s not Greek. It just looks like it. If you read it out loud they say things like “Let me at ‘im!” and “Full of spirit, aren’t they?” And it’s such a readerly joke, because the family hearing it doesn’t understand the “Greek” but we reading it (maybe) do. And the awful stepfather, who at this point in the book is becoming not-so-awful, saves the day by following the trick that Jason uses in the original myth. And it’s all metafictional and thoroughly delightful.

Ask me to name a favourite of her books, and I will unhesitatingly offer Fire and Hemlock, a lovely, rich, strange, complex, bewildering and truly wonderful riff on love and heroes and reading and enchantment and poetry. But, oh… there’s Howl’s Moving Castle with the vain but charming wizard Howl, and Sophie, who doesn’t know how powerful she is until she’s turned into an old woman, and the fire demon Calcifer who wants to be free but is loyal to them both. And there’s the debonaire and mysterious Chrestomanci. And Archer’s Goon. And The Homeward Bounders, whose final line “But you wouldn’t believe how lonely you get” never fails to bring tears to my eyes.

They are there now.

Thank you, Diana, from the bottom of my heart, for years and years of reading past and to come. Those bright characters and complex worlds will never die; they will be there always, ready to spring to life in the pages of your books.

I’m on it because, well, basically I’ve tried everything, and FB does seem to be quite a nice way of keeping up to date with “RL” friends and relatives, or to see another side of some acquaintances from other social networks like Flickr or LJ.

But it is very strange.

For example, I’m always rather disconcerted when someone “likes” it when someone else posts about something bad. You know: I post that one of my dogs died, and so-and-so “likes this.” I mean, I know they don’t like it, they are not pleased about my misfortune; what they really mean is “expressing sympathy” or “I feel for you.” So why can’t we have a range of responses? A drop-down menu with other possibilities like “empathizes” or “sympathizes” or “is sorry” or “is angry”? There isn’t even a “dislike” button, for heaven’s sake.

And don’t get me started on Farmville…

Thanks, Camosun. It’s been a good time.

I might have celebrated this evening, but I was teaching! Which is somehow appropriate

With their permission, I’d like to open a window on my class blogs. They blog anonymously, linked to a list in our password-protected class site – we all know who the authors are, but you won’t.

The first assignment was to write about the nature of “truth” (what is “creative” about creative non-fiction?) Here is one response

Then we started working on description, and their task was to write about a place they knew well and visited frequently. Lots of varying responses to that one; I loved this one about Island View Beach and this one that turned into a ghost story.

Another week we did interviews, then I suggested that they might like to try writing about themselves in the third person. They had a lot of fun with that

Then, they were asked to write about someone they’re close to, if possible with a photograph.

Maybe the most difficult task so far was the “braided essay” – focussing on structure and weaving together several different types of writing. These were based on a class where everyone brought “treasures” and there were many possibilities for how the students tied them together. Here’s one I loved
And another one.

I hate to limit this post to only a few entries – there were so many others I could have chosen, and there is so much talent in my class. But this will give you a taste of the exciting work that my students are doing.

Sometimes cats really do seem to come from another planet.

He accuses us (we teachers) of being ignorant of how much of this goes on. In fact, I was perfectly well aware that such services exist; you only have to Google any vaguely academic topic and after Wikipedia usually a high percentage of the top ten entries are links directly to a term-paper factory.

What is more disturbing is the somewhat accusatory tone:

I live well on the desperation, misery, and incompetence that your educational system has created.

This is like the criminal blaming the system, and, as in many criminal cases, there is probably some truth to it. We create pressures and perhaps do not adequately provide means for students to meet and handle those pressures.

I liked the example he gave of the “rich kids,” who are learning to do what they will spend their lives doing: pay someone else to provide a service for them.

This comment is perhaps a greater cause for concern:

Last summer The New York Times reported that 61 percent of undergraduates have admitted to some form of cheating on assignments and exams. Yet there is little discussion about custom papers and how they differ from more-detectable forms of plagiarism, or about why students cheat in the first place.

Custom papers do not make it impossible to detect cheating: of course we know that the student who can barely string two words together in an email did not write that smooth, coherent, intelligently argued paper. But how to prove it? Sometimes, if confronted, a student will break down and admit it. But often they do not. What are we to do?

Students hate in-class work, but often that is the only way to control whether or not the work is original.

I believe that we need to change our assignments, and to change the way we measure student success, but it feels like an endless problem. And cheating is not limited to colleges and universities: look at the Olympic athletes, already in the top of their field, already performing at a higher level than most mere mortals, who feel that they “have” to take performance-enhancing drugs in order to “compete.”

Indeed, I believe it is “competition,” and perhaps, at risk of sounding like a rampaging socialist, our market-driven society, that is pushing people to cheat. Colleges and universities are only the places that institutionalize the system. If the academic institutions were once again the places where people came to explore ideas, to learn, to express creativity, instead of credential factories, perhaps there would be fewer students willing to get those credentials by any means necessary.