Homecomings can be bittersweet, since they inevitably involve leavetakings.  And leaving the MV Explorer in San Diego left me a bit weak in the knees:  coming down that gangway and stairs for the last time, looking up at the ship that had been home for nearly four months, and plunging into a sea of luggage and boxes looking for those with my name on them—it was overwhelming in every way.  So I had little time for tears or nostalgia:  I had to find those boxes, get them to UPS, pick up my bags, and head to the airport.

As the taxi drove away, I took a last look at our ship, waving wildly to those still on board (about 20 people were staying on for an “enrichment voyage” to the Galapagos), and trying to get one last photograph.  Time to pull myself together and think “I’m home.”  And soon enough, I was home, just a short plane ride from San Diego to San Francisco and then a 40 minute drive to my condominium on the Stanford campus.  So I was home.  But I was not home alone.

Rather, I was greeted by house guests who had been staying in my place.  So I caught up with them while trying to unpack my two suitcases stuffed to bursting with things I had bought for my grandnieces Audrey and Lila (dresses from the Bahamas and Brazil and Ghana, pajamas from Japan and China, skirts from India . . . and more, much, much more).  I threw in a load of laundry and looked at my schedule for the next day:  meetings with eight graduate students starting at 8:00 a.m. and then two meetings in the late afternoon.  And, whoops, I’d forgotten that I had two other guests arriving the next morning, coming to work with me on a writing project for three days.  And oh yes, I would be flying to Vancouver, Canada the morning after they left to give some talks at Kwantlen Polytechnic.  And that was just for starters. 

My first ten or twelve days off the ship, then, brought a whirlwind of meetings, conferences, shuffling through mountains of mail, and travel:  the day after I returned from Canada I set off for North Carolina . . .though by this time I was working pretty much on adrenalin and will power alone.

But then . . . ahhhhhhh.  I returned from North Carolina on May 15 . . . and I was . . . home ALONE.  My first chance to sit quietly and reflect, to revisit my favorite spots in Ghana and India and Hong Kong, to call up the faces of the students in my seminar, of the Chinese Writing Center students, and of the Kids’ Writing Club.  Finally, I had time to do the kind of leavetaking I was hoping for, savoring every memory.  I got up and put on the “Thank You Mom” shirt that the students in my “extended family” had given me, the one that many of the kids had carefully printed their names on, along with some illustrations.  When I came to Betty’s name, I smiled all over.  Betty is almost six and has perfected printing her name, so she had written it out for me:  BETTY WILDE (but with the D backwards).  She showed it to me with pride and then said, “and can I write dotcom after it?  I LOVE to write dotcom.”  So her name is there, BETTY WILDE.COM, along with Rufus and Aibek and Sam and Josh and Charlie and Maeve and lots more.   They are all back at school now, have all slipped into their new selves into their old lives as the end of the school year approaches.  And what a year it has been!

So I’m home, and alone for a bit in the peace and quiet of my condo.  But I am not alone in the most important ways, for all those students, all those kids, are still with me.  They always will be.

While I am no fan of Nicholas Carr and do not believe that Google (or any of our technologies) is making us stupid, I have been struck by the number of books and articles in the last few years that have called attention to attention.  Most notable among them, in my view, is scholar of rhetoric Richard Lanham’s The Economics of Attention: Style and Substance in the Age of Information. In this eminently readable book, Lanham argues that we live in a time when information is what is NOT scarce—in fact, he says, we are “drowning” in it.  What we need, in this shift from the preeminence of  “stuff” (information, or substance) to “fluff”  (style, or the way information is presented) is an economics of attention—ways of making sense of the information coming at us and ways of attending to what is truly important.  The plethora, the onslaught, really, of information means that the senders of information compete for our attention:  hence style becomes dominant and it’s the message sender who bests packages the message who will get attention—and hence business.

Another book that argues for the importance of getting and keeping attention is William Powers’ Hamlet’s Blackberry:  A Practical Philosophy for Building a Good Life in the Digital Age. While both books offer meditations on life in the digital age, this text is very different from Lanham’s—part memoir, part how-to book, part intellectual journey, it looks to past thinkers (from Plato to McLuhan) to draw lessons on how people grappled with changing technologies of their times.  Like Lanham, however, he focuses on the ability to attend carefully to important things and offers advice about how to make room for the quiet contemplative time necessary to full attentiveness. 

When Powers speaks of the innate human need to connect, which is fed by the astonishing powers of connectivity today, he reminds me of Kenneth Burke’s assertion that we have two basic human motivations always at work in us:  one is the need for connection, which he calls “identification”; the other is the need for division, the opposite of connection.  To be fully human, Burke argues, we must balance our need for connection with others with our need to be separate, disconnected, uniquely ourselves.  This is the same balance Krista Ratcliffe seeks in her many writings on the power of rhetorical listening, which helps foster both of these human needs and goals.

What do these theorists have to offer teachers of writing?  The first lesson I draw has to do with my own ability to see both substance and style clearly—and to attend carefully to both.  That means I have to be both attending to something (say an advertisement) and attending as well to my response to it.  That is, I have to be thinking critically all the time, something that is very hard to do, especially when we are so constantly distracted (by social media and other technologies).  So I need to practice this mode of attention before I can talk about it and share it with my students.  This last year I have asked them often about their own ability to attend.  They say freely that it’s getting harder and harder, though many of them still believe that they can multitask their ways through college and through life.  I think—not so much.  And here’s where writing comes in:  the act of writing slows us down, makes us attend to our thoughts and our words.  It is one way to build and maintain attentiveness.  So while Hamlet may not have had a Blackberry, he did have writing, and he used to create marvelous, mind-bending, and incredibly attentive observations that have lasted nearly 500 years.  Our means of communication are surely changing and developing, but writing (defined broadly as using symbols to express meaning) seems here to stay—and writing teachers along with it!

Before every new country we visited, the Deans called a “Cultural Preport” meeting, during which we learned about the port and country– an overview of their economic and political condition and what we need to know in order not to offend.  Every cultural preport meeting started with Dean Stuart saying something like, “Ghana tomorrow. Ghana tomorrow. Ghana tomorrow” and the students cheering and clapping with delight.  So, after hearing students saying things like “I would love to help out at an orphanage, but we don’t have any orphanages in the U.S.,” or “Our schools in the U.S. are so superior to these we are seeing,” or “Poverty just isn’t a problem in the U.S.,” the faculty began to plan a cultural preport meeting about the U.S.A.

Alex Nalbach, the Global Studies professor, kicked off the cultural preport with a guiding question, as he has done all semester: “Why is the U.S. so profoundly marked by inequality?”  In opening, he pointed out that our GDP is not as high as that of Singapore or Japan and that among the 21 countries who are members of the Organization of Economic and Commercial Development, we are in the bottom 5 for poverty, income inequality, child poverty, and overall social justice rating.  Quoting Martin Luther King, Jr. in 1960, Alex said, “one hundred years after abolition, we see a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast sea of prosperity.” (I’m not quoting exactly…sorry.) 

Next came Ridge Schuyler, from Charlottesville, VA, who provided us with a case study of Charlottesville. Deemed one of the most affluent cities in the east and with a population of 44,000, Charlottesville boasts a median income of $60,000.  Not bad.  Until, Ridge pointed out, you “break it down.”  Then you can see that the University of Virginia neighborhood has an average family income of $102,000—and the neighborhood just adjacent to it has an income of only $21,000.  That’s just below the poverty line for a family of four, but when Ridge studied the area’s prices to see how much it would actually take to live, he came up with $25,379—NOT including money for child care or transportation to work. “I am sure you have a neighborhood like that where you live,” Ridge said, “Now go home and find it—and then do something about it.”

Heather Paxton talked to us about “food insecurity,” the term that has replaced “hunger” in government documents.  As of 2010, 15.4% of U.S. households suffer from such insecurity—that’s 48.8 million people, including 16.2 million children.  Most troubling of all, these Census Bureau figures don’t include the homeless, so the percentage of those going hungry in our country is actually higher than the figures suggest.

John Downing spoke about the “American Dream,” the notion that anyone who works hard will eventually get ahead.  John showed us the underside of this notion, that anyone who doesn’t make it simply isn’t working hard:  their poverty is their own fault. This John calls the “culture of poverty,” which is endemic in the U.S. right now.  As John pointed out, from 1930 to 1970 wages rose every single decade in constant dollars, but since 1970 they have fallen by 12%.   This change has meant, in many cases, both parents working just to stay off welfare.   When we consider that 9 million families have been foreclosed since July, 2007, we see more and more families falling below the poverty line.  Quoting George Carlin, John summed up by saying, “It’s called the American Dream because you have to be asleep to believe it.”

Margaret Bass put to rest the idea that we have no orphanages in the United States.  In fact, over 175,000 children are in orphanages today.  Among children living in poverty, 12% are white, 38% African American, 35% Latino; 13% Asian.  Not that there aren’t plenty of poor white folks as well, she said.  In her college town in upstate New York, where 93% of the residents are white, 18% are living below the poverty line.

If we thought things couldn’t get much more bleak, we were wrong.  Rob Thomas centered our attention on San Diego, our next port. “Do you remember all that trash in the streets in India?” he asked.  Nodding heads all around.  “So what do you think we’ll find in San Diego?”  The students responded, “clean streets.” “Wrong,” said Rob, “San Diego is a mess, an environmental disaster. You just can’t see it.” He went on to say that societies can be divided into two groups, Lumpers and Spreaders.  India is a perfect example of a “spreader” society, and that’s why we saw trash strewn everywhere we looked.  America, on the other hand, is a perfect example of a “lumper” society:  we lump our trash all together and then remove it from sight.  Out of sight, out of mind; that’s the American way.  He then offered some truly alarming statistics, including the fact that we are number 1 in the world in organic water pollution, CO2 emissions, and production of solid waste.  That’s one reason people around the world have a dim view of Americans. They know that we are using up and indeed throwing away goods that would help keep them alive.

I was the last speaker on this panel, assigned to speak on the topic of literacy.  Could I offer any lessons that might give students ways to think productively about how to go forward?  Well, I could point out that literacy rates in the U.S., while not as high as those in some places (like the state of Kerala in India, or in Japan), are relatively strong, with 87% high school graduation rates.  The good news is that the more education you have, the better off you will be in the U.S..  The bad news is that there’s a big fat Catch 22 at work here.  Earning is highly correlated to education—unless you are a woman or a person of color.  Women continue to earn consistently less than men, even when they have the same or greater levels of education; the same holds true for Black and Latino workers.  So, I was able to say, education is necessary for access and equality and success in the U.S.A., but it is not sufficient for access, equality, and success.

What holds true, however, is that education (and literacy, its byproduct) still offers possibilities, and today, during the biggest literacy revolution the world has ever seen, the young are reading and writing more than ever before, developing new and multiple literacies.  And the internet is making education available in new and powerful ways—perhaps to those who have heretofore lacked access.  This year, for example, a Stanford professor (Nobel prize winner) offered a course online for free—and something like 60,000 people signed up for it.  What might happen if access to education truly were opened up to those on the lonely islands of poverty MLK spoke about half a century ago?

I concluded my remarks with some examples of people who had been kept down by an educational system rife with racism and destructive hyperindividualism—but who managed to break out of those constraints and claim education and literacy as powerful tools for themselves. I challenged the students not just to complete their Bachelor’s degrees but also to continue with their education, to be aware of their own privileges, and to form coalitions and collectives to spread those privileges to others.  Education, I said, is the key:  not sufficient, still, but necessary.

We’re not sure how effective our attempt at a cultural preport meeting was, though students have been writing and reflecting on what they heard and the ship has been abuzz with discussion.  I must say that while I tried to conclude our session with some hope, I felt pretty overwhelmed with everything I had learned from my colleagues.  Today I arrived in San Diego and soon I will continue on home to Stanford.  Will I be able to act on what I have learned?  I hope so.  But even more, I hope the students will be able to do so.

My two roller bags are packed and in the hallway outside my cabin, along with three boxes I plan to mail through UPS when I get off the ship tomorrow.  One hundred and five days, eleven countries, countless moments of insight, joy, sadness, even despair.  I am almost home now, but the “I” that will be home is not the same “I” that left Fort Lauderdale on January 17, 2012.

I now carry the memories, the images, the sounds of so many places, carry the faces of babies and children and mothers and fathers and old people, all of them alive with the hope that tomorrow may yet be better than today.  That longing is universal, as is the joy of human connection, the love of family, and the thirst for knowledge.  But oh the differences among us, the rich and deep differences that make cultures unique.  I learned about the deeply animistic spirituality of a mother and father in Brazil, of the role of music in almost every aspect of life in Ghana, of the way daily ritual infuses the lives of so many in India, of the uneasy tensions between state and those governed in Singapore, of different values, different senses of time, different ways of being in the world.  I feel infinitely small, my little concerns and worries inconsequential not only against the backdrop of history but also the daily suffering of so many millions. 

So I have been sobered by this adventure—but also exhilarated.  Late in life, I agree with Aristotle that learning is the greatest human pleasure.  And I am grateful to those I have learned with and from.  I have spent quite a bit of time with the Chinese students on board, learning so much from them about what it is like to be a young person in China today, about their concerns and grievances with the government, about their aspirations and hopes and dreams.  Their language abilities amaze me—and it has been a special pleasure to watch them “getting the joke” just a beat or two after the native English speakers.  Last night one of the young Chinese women was saying that her father tells her she must not have a boyfriend and must not get married—in one breath—and in the next tells her she must give him grandchildren.  “Why, why, can I do that?” she asked.  When I said, “Well, HOW is the big question. How can you do that?” She paused for several seconds and then burst out in laughter, blushing.  This moment of shared laughter, of “getting it” together, characterizes so many of the happy moments I’ve had getting to know these Chinese students.

Two of these young women have been in my class all term, both working to immerse themselves in English since they have been accepted to graduate school in the United States this coming fall (one to Johns Hopkins, one to Penn).  To my surprise and delight, they came by my cabin to say a special goodbye and we hugged and cried a little together.  They know they are in for some major changes and are anxious about what it will mean to be living so far away from home and family during their graduate careers.  After a bit, we just sat quietly, holding hands and soaking in a feeling of togetherness.  When I got up this morning, I found a note from one of them:

Thank you for letting me be one of your students, for giving me support and advice, for helping create something I am proud of, for teaching me what is love and what is life.  I will keep the memory of this voyage forever.  I will miss you, but there is an old Chinese saying that “good friend never part in mind.”

As I leave this voyage, I take Yunshu’s words with me:  good friend never part in mind.

Surely this note also carries a very special meaning for teachers everywhere.  Close your eyes and I know you will see the faces of so many students rise up in your memory, so many connections over so many years:  good friend never part in mind.

On this round-the-world voyage I have had a chance to watch a number of students studying, and to talk with them about how and why they study.  I’ve learned a lot, as I always do when I listen hard to students.  But I’ve learned most from the 12 Chinese students on board, who seem to me to—generally speaking—take studying to a whole new level, to a form of art, or perhaps of self-inflicted torture.  When I had a chance to have dinner in Shanghai with Chen, I jumped at the chance.  First of all, I wanted her to take me to the best Sichuan restaurant in the city, and she certainly did so.  But second and much more important, I wanted to talk with her about her experiences at school.  In fact, I’d been looking for such an opportunity ever since I overheard her say something about coming to the United States to study law.

As we enjoyed our long, leisurely meal, Chen told me she was a “studying machine,” that she had to be one in order to get into one of China’s best universities.  “What does a studying machine do?” I asked.  Chen described a typical day this way:

I wake up at 5:30 or 6:00 and memorize while I eat my breakfast.  Then I go to school from 7:30 until noon.  I take one hour break for lunchtime and nap and then more school until 6:00 p.m.  Then another short break before more school from 7:00 to 10:00.  Then I study and do homework until midnight.

Chen described carrying out this routine six days a week throughout her education:

I know I have to memorize many books if I want to do well and go to good college. So, I decide to become very strong while I study.  I walk and study, walk and memorize, walk and read, walk and study.  Walking helps me stay awake so that I can study longer and harder.  I remember many days walking back and forth in school or back and forth at home on my street.  I always have a book in my hand and other ones in my bag.  I am never without a big book to learn.  But I cry.  Five times a day I cry.  At least.  Without my parents helping me and telling me I can succeed, I could never have done it.

I drew a deep breath.  Across the table from me, Chen, a tiny young woman whose eyes twinkle behind big round glasses and whose smile is infectious, was talking about crying five times a day for twelve years?  “Oh yes,” she assured me.  “At least five.”  “But,” she said, “I made it and now I go to university where I also study very, very hard. I decided on this trip that I don’t want to study in China anymore.”

Chen cites a number of reasons for her decision to try to pursue higher education in the United States.  A determined and fierce feminist, Chen wants to study law in order to improve the lives of women.  She thinks the U.S. is a good place to undertake such studies, though she knows that getting a high score on the LSAT and being admitted to a U.S. law school won’t be easy.  In addition, she says she is very tired of memorizing books:  “I want to write something that is in books on my own.”

My guess is that Chen will succeed in “writing something that is in books.”  When I think of the study routine that has brought her to this point—and of her persistence and strength and stamina—I am humbled, and I can’t help but compare her “studying” to my own and to that of most students I know.  Six days a week?  Thirteen hours a day? For how long??

Since that evening I have thought a lot about the relationship between studying and learning.  Clearly, number of hours put in does not automatically yield greater knowledge.  But there is something to be said for Chen’s method of securing her future, as for Malcolm Gladwell’s claim that it takes ten thousand hours to gain expertise at anything.  Chen is willing to put in those ten thousand hours, and more.  I wonder how many of us can say the same?

I’ve been writing about the power of images and especially about the power of combining words and images in comics for some time now.  Starting about ten years ago, I began to include at least one graphic narrative in every class I teach, and I eventually got my courage up to offer an entire course on comics (for undergraduates) and another one (for teachers) on using comics in the English classroom.  The more I work with these texts, the more convinced I am that they constitute an important and vibrant form of literature, one worth studying extensively.

So I am used to being an advocate for comics in English classes.  And of course I am aware of the impact comics are having in the larger world:  When groups like Google engage comics artists to write/draw manuals for them, when Charles Schwab ads on TV feature speech balloons, when a graphic narrative version of the 9/11 report sells out overnight (while its print equivalent languishes unbought and unread), well, it seems pretty clear that comics have come of age. 

Over the past year, I have been fortunate enough to have the opportunity to collaborate with artist GB Tran, author of the Eisner-nominated graphic memoir Vietnamerica. GB is creating illustrations for the forthcoming Fifth Edition of The Everyday Writer, and he and I worked together on several panels that illustrate and ask questions about various aspects of the writing process, from analyzing rhetorical situations and developing a thesis to synthesizing sources. (I’m delighted with the results–more on that later!)

Recently Bedford/St. Martin’s invited GB to present a Webinar on how comics work as writing and how students can use a graphic approach to help them work through their own writing processes. You can watch the archived version here.  I’d love to hear more stories from teachers of writing who are using comics with their students—what’s worked well for you?

*Editor’s Note: As Andrea sails across the Pacific Ocean toward her final destination, Hawaii, we share with you another post she wrote before departing on her voyage around the world.   

Along with my coauthors John Ruszkiewicz and Keith Walters, I’ve been working on a new edition of Everything’s an Argument, so I’ve had argument on my mind a lot over the last six months.  When I got the December issue of College Composition and Communication, then, I was very interested to see an essay on argument by A. Abby Knoblauch,  “A Textbook Argument:  Definitions of Argument in Leading Composition Textbooks.”  Here’s the abstract for the essay:

This essay examines the definitions and practices of argument perpetuated by popular composition textbooks, illustrating how even those texts that appear to forward expansive notions of argument ultimately limit it to an intent to persuade.  In doing so, they help to perpetuate constricted practices of argument within undergraduate composition classrooms.  

In the course of her essay, Knoblauch looks at two textbooks in particular, Everything’s an Argument and Ramage, Bean, and Johnson’s Writing Arguments.  I am grateful to Knoblauch for this essay and for the attention it draws to alternative modes of argument.  Indeed, as the author shows, feminist scholars/rhetors have for some time been working to move beyond the strictures of Greek and Roman argumentation, with their focus on winning above all.  I think particularly of Foss and Griffin’s “invitational” rhetoric, which aims at understanding and exploration. While this work has traditionally been rejected by (mostly white male) scholars in Communication Studies, it has been embraced by feminist rhetoricians and teachers of writing.  In fact, Cheryl Glenn and I are at work on an essay on rhetoric and feminism for The Oxford Handbook of Rhetorical Studies, in which we call for a universal feminist rhetoric, the goal of which is to change the way people interact with one another and to focus on working together and on understanding rather than winning.

So I am sympathetic to the goals of Knoblauch’s essay and, as I say, grateful for it.  And I take the point of her criticism that like other first-year college textbooks, Everything’s an Argument teaches students to mount effective arguments of their own in an effort to join the conversation surrounding their topic, to listen carefully and respectfully to those contributing to the contribution, and to—in Kenneth Burke’s telling phrase—“put in their oars” or make their voices heard.  In doing so, our textbook also attends to the “intent to persuade,” which underlies much of contemporary discourse.  And in my view, it must do so for several reasons.  First, students today need to be exquisitely aware of how many varied messages are attempting to persuade them; they need to know how to understand and evaluate those messages.  In addition, they need to know how traditional modes of persuasion have worked—and they need to be able to engage those modes themselves, with confidence.

That does not mean, however, that I am not anxious to see students engage new ways of communicating with others, ways based on listening (in the way Krista Ratcliffe sets forth in Rhetorical Listening: Identification, Gender, Whiteness ), on mutual respect, and on embodied performances of understanding.  We need to remember, though, that teaching such “alternative” means of argument is not simple, that students need multiple models of such argument, and that these forms of argument may well operate with greater salience in their out-of-school lives than their in-school lives, at least for the present.

So once again, teachers of writing need to step up to the challenge:  we need to articulate and model these alternative means of argument, learn to work effectively with them, and share them and their methods with our students.  That’s a tall order, but one I am happy to try to meet.

*Editor’s Note: As Andrea arrives in Japan, we share with you a fitting post she wrote back in November.

So here I am in Atlanta with a group of teachers form Georgia Tech and Georgia State. We’ve been talking all evening about our writing programs and writing centers, about looming budget cuts and other threats, and, mostly, about our students.  A good, good evening with a good, good group.

For the last several weeks I’ve been trying to remember a term I’d heard at last year’s  Cs. I knew the term came from Japan (Pokémon kept crowding into my mind whenever I tried to remember…) and that it was a kind of oral performance game.  Maybe.  Then at the end of dinner one evening, Georgia Tech’s Robin Wharton, sitting across from me, said “PechaKucha” to the person on her left.  I almost tipped over my chair.  At last: the lost term!

Robin graciously filled me in. Yes, PechaKucha (“chit chat”) started in Japan and yes, it is an entertainment of sorts, one that has gone viral around the world.  Each person uses a simple presentation format to show 20 images, each for 20 seconds.  The presenter accompanies each slide with a talk or a story based on the slides, and the challenge is to get the words to match the ever-forward-moving slides perfectly.  As the PechaKucha website puts it,

Good PechaKucha presentations are the ones that uncover the unexpected, unexpected talent, unexpected ideas. Some PechaKuchas tell great stories about a project or a trip. Some are incredibly personal, some are incredibly funny, but all are very different, making each PechaKucha Night like ‘a box of chocolates’.

Robin uses PechaKuchas in her writing classes:  her students start with the topic they are working on and then develop 20 images that best convey the information or argument they want to make.  Then they begin crafting words to match the slides, choosing each one for maximum impact.  Twenty seconds isn’t very long, so every word has to count big time.  Robin says her students love the challenge of PechaKucha and that they practice to perfect their performances.

No wonder the term had struck me as so interesting: I had wanted to try it out with my own students last spring but then couldn’t remember it for the life of me.  Thanks to Robin, I now had a plan.

You are probably way ahead of me and use PechaKuchas in lots of ways.  If you do, please write and share your experiences with us.  If not, take a look at PechaKucha.org, and then join the fun!

I thought I had seen some spectacular skylines—and indeed I have:  San Francisco, Vancouver, New York, Sydney, Auckland, Stockholm—but nothing prepared me for the triple whammy of Singapore, Hong Kong, and Shanghai.  These places all feature waterfronts that positively glitter with excitement and energy, and gorgeous backdrops of mountains and forests.  I came away from each city wishing I had been able to spend at least an entire day with an architectural expert learning some of the history of these magical buildings.  I already mentioned Singapore’s very tall, very slender building that actually curved in mid-air, like a giant silver stylus poised to write on the sky; another building that looked like a mid-Ohio Indian burial mound writ large; and this hotel with a cruise-ship-sized swimming pool on top (two young women on the ship walked onto an elevator, pretended to be with a guest, and spent the day lounging poolside!).

  These Singaporean buildings were matched (at least) by Hong Kong, with its mix of ancient temples and high-tech headquarters stretching as far as I could see.  A tram ride up to the top of Victoria Peak (the tallest mountain on Hong Kong Island at nearly 2000 feet) provides a panoramic view of the entire city, with a 2.5 kilometer walkabout that circles the peak and thus gives views from all directions.  Prominent in this skyscraper forest is the huge tower, with its claw-like pinnacle—the one Batman dove off of in The Dark Knight. 

And then Shanghai.  I don’t know what I was expecting, but certainly not this very, very modern, high-tech skyline, sleek towers, and one tall building that looked like a bottle opener:  At the top, a huge rectangular opening opens up the entire building, so that there’s a window opening onto blue sky.  (The building was designed, I heard, by a Japanese architectural firm, who planned a huge circular window at the top.  The Chinese, however, rejected the circular figure as “too Japanese” and opted for the rectangle instead!).  It’s to the right in this photograph, with the much taller media tower to the left:

Of course there’s so much more to these cities than their skylines.  In Hong Kong, I went from Victoria Peak down to the harbor for a sampan ride through a maze of floating restaurants and fishing boats and rode the Star Ferry for the equivalent of 25 cents—with wonderful sights to see on each crossing.  In Shanghai, I visited a community center on a Saturday morning where members of the neighborhood were doing ballroom dancing (yes!) on three floors—the older folks on the first floor, teenagers on the second, and kids on the third, all dancing their hearts out.  And I visited the home of a retired teacher whose wife prepared a feast for us:  at least fifteen different dishes, everything from braised bok choy to noodle dishes to dumplings to duck breast to a spectacular radish dish to bean paste buns.  They gave us a tour of their condo (everyone in Shanghai lives in either “budget apartments” subsidized by the government or condos) where they lived with their son and his wife and their grandson, who went to boarding school during the week but was there on the weekends.  In addition to the sitting/dining room, we saw their kitchen (counters so low I would be on my knees cooking!), a washroom sink in the hallway, a bathroom with toilet and small shower, and two bedrooms.  Our host said he had bought the 900-square foot condo about 12 years ago, and he was very proud of it and of the three generations of trophies displayed in the living room:  his and his son’s for gymnastics, the grandson’s for soccer.  Visiting this home was a real thrill to me; it’s one thing to visit famous sights and look at skylines, and another altogether to visit a home.

I’m now looking forward to seeing the Tokyo skyline from the ship, but I wonder if it can match up to these other fabulous cities!

*Editor’s Note: While we wait to hear from Andrea on her travel and experiences in China, we hope you’ll enjoy this post she wrote in January, before she embarked on her spring 2012 Semester at Sea voyage.

My students are reporting ongoing difficulty with evaluating sources, and especially those they find online (of course!).  Nowadays, they don’t have much trouble identifying possible sources; in fact, just a couple of rudimentary searches yields so many potential sources that it’s hard to know where to turn. As a result, they often feel overwhelmed, just choosing the first ones that look interesting or throwing up their hands and putting the task off for another time.

Rebecca Moore Howard and Sandra Jamieson’s Citation Project is helpfully charting just how student writers are using sources in their writing, and preliminary data suggest that students are not engaging their sources as critically as we might want them to and that, moreover, they tend to take material from only the first couple of pages of any source.  Thus, Howard and her colleagues suggest that writing teachers should think hard before starting students on research projects without some very careful scaffolding.

I’ve written before about the effects of information overload on all of us, but particularly on college students.  Recently, I’ve had an opportunity to talk with people outside the academy who have similar concerns, particularly regarding our ability to judge the quality or reliability of what we read in newspapers and magazines.  A new group, Hypothes.is, founded by Dan Whaley, has set its sights on addressing this issue.

When I first heard about Hypothes.is, I was skeptical at best:  how could these goals be accomplished, technically? Where would this body of experts come from who would provide the “best thinking”?  But as I’ve followed the group and talked with Whaley about it, I have come to see that the goals of Hypothes.is are achievable and that this new free resource could be of great help to readers in general, students in particular.  I encourage you to check out the site, where you can view the short video of Dan talking about “The Internet, Peer Reviewed” and read more about what this group is doing.

I plan to follow the work of Hypothes.is closely and hope to develop ways to use their tools with my students.  In the meantime, they are looking for talented folks to join the team—and you just might want to join!