Author: rogers (Page 1 of 2)

Greetings, all! Prepare to be amazed as you read my reviewing of our project contract in real time.

First, to the mission statement! Okay, actually, the mission statement mostly has generalities. So it goes. Let us evaluate it, anyway. We certainly did elucidate readers on the educational system in Ontario. Regarding the history of censorship, that mostly disappeared for a more modern description of censorship, but I find that to be acceptable. As I recall, I could not find any comprehensive histories of Canadian censorship, and it is likely for the best that I lacked an excuse to be even more long-winded. I would say we did well in terms of treating both sides with respect, sans our analyses, which were meant to be our own personal opinions. I ragged on Pullman quite a bit in my analysis, though there was also specified in the mission statement to be such a section, so that works out well. I cannot find much else in the mission statement I can evaluate, save for perhaps some descriptions of the ideals of how we were to treat the case, which I am not objective enough to judge.

For the digital tools section, I would say that we ended up using those tools that we needed. For instance, Audacity, YouTube, and iMovie were the three completely unused tools, as we did not have video or audio recordings of interviews, but rather transcripts (or email correspondence, both work). We did not end up communicating much, instead with Lauren and I focusing on our own work, so Google Docs was not used overmuch. We ended up using a Coggle for navigation and not planning purposes on the home page, and then this was cut, but Coggle did make a temporary appearance on our website. The other tools were used as expected.

We then get into the section entitled “Website Organization/Milestones.” This section ended up rather changed in terms of organization in reality, and even more changed in terms of deadlines. While I may have met a few of these deadlines, I mostly just hung out at Crickets Coffee, spending way too much money on tea and bagels, as we neared the due date for our website’s first draft, writing all of the things that should have been done weeks before. Such is life. The website looks good now, so I will say that my procrastination worked out in the end. I suspect listing organization differences would be pointless and tedious, so let us just say that, while we kept with the same structure for the overall headings, pages did end up being moved around.

Now, to the pages themselves. Looking at things, every single page that we had allotted to do, both Lauren and I, was included in the final website, sans a page on the complainant, which was provisional in the contract and ultimately information we were unable to gather. Some pages, such as “Primary Sources,” ended up being split into many separate pages with different goals, such as specifically providing school documents or dealing with the media response to the case. We also added a page on “The Taboo of Atheism” that we never predicted in our contract, and many pages have expanded degrees of content, though none are lacking as far as this section is concerned.

The “Additional Milestones” page was mostly just an extension of the previous section, and was concerned with due dates, so needless to say they were flexible, though due dates such as those for the completed and draft websites were approximately met.

Now, to the Division of Labor. One can tell than Lauren started this section of the contract, because I am the sort of person who would have spelled it “labour.” We did trade some amount in terms of who was doing what whilst in the midst of creating the website. Namely, I ended up writing the page on Philip Pullman, whereas Lauren took on the viewpoints of outside organizations, although said organizations appear throughout our website on both of our pages. We also ended up editing and proofreading our own work instead of each other’s, which was probably easier on both of us. Navigation ended up being somewhat more Lauren’s duty, despite being listed as being one of mine, though our navigation was not particularly complicated and was primarily just the bar at the top of our website.

I did indeed end up doing my “biography” page, which became my half of the “About the Authors,” as well as my allotted summary of the Canadian educational system, although that page ended up becoming strictly on the province of Ontario. My StoryMap for additional challenges is present as well, as are the inevitable editing and citations for my half. The history of Halton/Southern Ontario was the only part of this which ended up with significant alterations. Ultimately, I did do an history of Halton page, but because Halton is a Regional Municipality and has no real community history because it is primarily an administrative division. Thus, said page ended up being completely replaced with a page on Halton’s demographics, which is ultimately much more useful than an history of administrative boundaries. Ultimately, this was the only significant alteration of a page from what was originally listed in my half of this section of the contract.

I came into looking at our project contract with very low expectations, knowing quite a bit had changed since then, but it ultimately seems that while the content of pages may have changed a great deal, the outline in our project contract was surprisingly unchanged overall.

So, with this, I am all but done. Woohoo! Click here to a Google Doc with our project contract.

This is an article by author Chris Crutcher, written in the Huffington Post. Crutcher’s novel, Whale Talk, was being used in a new and innovative way as an all-school read in the rural Michigan town of Fowlerville, near Detroit. This book was being taught in every classroom, not just in English classes, but also science, mathematics, physical education, and so on. Crutcher speaks on all the praise he received when the school was teaching the book, with statements along the lines of getting students who never read to read from teachers. Crutcher’s novel was then challenged by a parent due to racist language repeated by a five year-old mixed race girl that was directed at her by her racist stepfather. After a storm of media coverage, the district chose to retain the book in the curriculum but essentially ended teaching it, directing students to finish the book on their own and then not discussing said book, instead quickly moving on to avoid controversy.

Crutcher is very clearly bitter about this. The way he rages against the parent who challenged his novel in the first place, who had formerly home-schooled her child, is particularly strong. Crutcher explicitly claims that said parent was home-schooling her daughter in order to control what information entered her mind, and thus was shocked and horrified by the loss of control that her daughter may end up reading something she had not carefully screened. While Crutcher is not wrong, this attack feels more like the actions of a petulant child than a full-grown adult. What, precisely, did he think he would get out of making such assumptions? Had Crutcher stuck to his intellectual argument, it would have certainly been strong, but personal attacks are doubtful to have gotten him anywhere.

I agree with Crutcher’s complaints about the ability of a singular parent to change the learning of an entire community of students. Crutcher is absolutely correct about the dangers of as much, and I tend to agree that there should be minimal censorship in general. Shielding children from reality simply delays their knowledge and creates a potentially damaging naivete. But, again, Crutcher’s hostile tone undercuts his argument. Crutcher makes a similar point to the one I just made, claiming that seeing what he believes to be a heart wrenching scene is unlikely to make one’s children racist. But, then, Crutcher ends his article expressing a facetious fear about And Tango Makes Three, pretending to be afraid of said book making children wish to grow up to become penguins. Crutcher is being a jerk here, to censor myself instead of having a school district do it for me.

I agree with Crutcher’s fears of censorship almost completely. But, his blind condemnation and explicitly hostile tone completely undercuts his argument, and ultimately makes me imagine this read would further reinforce the views of pro-censorship advocates, as opposed to actually changing minds. Ultimately, Chris Crutcher wanted an echo chamber too rage into, and he succeeded in finding one. But, I know full well that were I a school librarian or administrator, this would offer an excellent reason to not want to work with him.

I suppose this shall be my final progress report, having met my quota of five progress report posts with this one. My half of Geneseo’s website is near, but not quite, complete. Three pages still need to be written, namely my analysis of the censorship case, an historical overview of censorship, and the page which I already have the research done for and simply need to spent a few minutes to write, on the religious objections to The Golden Compass, specifically focusing on Philip Pullman’s rather inflammatory comments. I also need to touch up the several other pages I completed over this weekend, namely adding pictures as opposed to the plain text several pages have now.

Ultimately, the writing of these pages was not too terribly arduous, once I finally managed to sit down and do so. Sitting in Crickets Coffee, my cafe of choice, on a rather uncomfortable stool for around four hours until my once-fully charged laptop was on the bring of battery death (using the term “dying” for running out of power is somewhat bizarre, honestly). Before getting into the individual pages I just wrote, an irritance: I know not if this is how WordPress sites are or if this is a function of our chosen theme, but putting words in italics on our site also bolds the words without actually marking them as “bolded,”independent of whether that is wanted. Considering MLA has book titles in italics, this is certainly somewhat upsetting and something I am unsure of how to change. So it goes.

In writing the page offering a short biography, I was impressed at just how many awards Philip Pullman had won for his writings. Pullman was even granted a knighthood this prior 2018 holiday season, which is pretty impressive. Pullman also won both a Carnegie Medal and “the Carnegie of Carnegies,” for being the reader-chosen best recipient of the medal within its first seventy years. Pullman also has won several other awards, the most notable of which to my untrained eye seems to be his status as the first children’s author to win the Whitbread Book of the Year Award.

One of the other recently-created pages was a brief history of the Halton community, which, having done my research and written the page, is not necessarily as useful as one might have hoped. Halton is a regional municipality in Canada, formerly a county and before that a district, meaning it is not a community in the traditional sense, rather being a somewhat more reaching municipal jurisdiction which actually includes three towns and a city, each of which have their own identities. Still, the page was written, though it feels like it mostly has to do with a history of the shifting administrative tendencies in Canada than a specific community.

I also created a StoryMap JS this previous Saturday showing the locations and details of those other challenges to The Golden Compass that I could actually find information for, in chronological order. The reasons for the challenges, or at least the main ones mentioned, were all pretty similar, focusing on the (here I would typically put “supposed,” and consistently do on the website, but Pullman is about as explicit as one can be) anti-Christian and anti-Catholic elements of the novels. Though, the challenger in Winchester, Kentucky, also objected to drug consumption in the books, namely wine and poppy with meals. The Halton case also seemed to have had some amount of objection to the novels’ supposed violence. So it goes.

That is all that comes to mind for this post. Enjoy thine day.

I suppose this shall be my final progress report, having met my quota of five progress report posts with this one. My half of Geneseo’s website is near, but not quite, complete. Three pages still need to be written, namely my analysis of the censorship case, an historical overview of censorship, and the page which I already have the research done for and simply need to spent a few minutes to write, on the religious objections to The Golden Compass, specifically focusing on Philip Pullman’s rather inflammatory comments. I also need to touch up the several other pages I completed over this weekend, namely adding pictures as opposed to the plain text several pages have now.

Ultimately, the writing of these pages was not too terribly arduous, once I finally managed to sit down and do so. Sitting in Crickets Coffee, my cafe of choice, on a rather uncomfortable stool for around four hours until my once-fully charged laptop was on the bring of battery death (using the term “dying” for running out of power is somewhat bizarre, honestly). Before getting into the individual pages I just wrote, an irritance: I know not if this is how WordPress sites are or if this is a function of our chosen theme, but putting words in italics on our site also bolds the words without actually marking them as “bolded,”independent of whether that is wanted. Considering MLA has book titles in italics, this is certainly somewhat upsetting and something I am unsure of how to change. So it goes.

In writing the page offering a short biography, I was impressed at just how many awards Philip Pullman had won for his writings. Pullman was even granted a knighthood this prior 2018 holiday season, which is pretty impressive. Pullman also won both a Carnegie Medal and “the Carnegie of Carnegies,” for being the reader-chosen best recipient of the medal within its first seventy years. Pullman also has won several other awards, the most notable of which to my untrained eye seems to be his status as the first children’s author to win the Whitbread Book of the Year Award.

One of the other recently-created pages was a brief history of the Halton community, which, having done my research and written the page, is not necessarily as useful as one might have hoped. Halton is a regional municipality in Canada, formerly a county and before that a district, meaning it is not a community in the traditional sense, rather being a somewhat more reaching municipal jurisdiction which actually includes three towns and a city, each of which have their own identities. Still, the page was written, though it feels like it mostly has to do with a history of the shifting administrative tendencies in Canada than a specific community.

I also created a StoryMap JS this previous Saturday showing the locations and details of those other challenges to The Golden Compass that I could actually find information for, in chronological order. The reasons for the challenges, or at least the main ones mentioned, were all pretty similar, focusing on the (here I would typically put “supposed,” and consistently do on the website, but Pullman is about as explicit as one can be) anti-Christian and anti-Catholic elements of the novels. Though, the challenger in Winchester, Kentucky, also objected to drug consumption in the books, namely wine and poppy with meals. The Halton case also seemed to have had some amount of objection to the novels’ supposed violence. So it goes.

That is all that comes to mind for this post. Enjoy thine day.

I have come to the rather aggravating conclusion that something about the WiFi of SUNY Geneseo, or at least in my dormitory (which, admittedly, may be a facet of its being “the oldest dorm on campus,” as if that was a good thing) does not agree with my desire to update our WordPress site. I have yet to have an issue when writing these blog posts, but the internet seems to have some problem with me when attempting to put new text into our site. This is incredibly upsetting, but I suppose it is what it is. Directly prior to the writing of this post, I was in my preferred coffee shop off of Geneseo’s campus, where I was able to work on and update our site as I am meant to be able to with (relative) ease. This is an excellent excuse for me to waste more money on those rosemary olive bagels I so love, one supposes.

I just completed what will turn out to be one half of the religion page on our website, discussing the history of publicly funded Catholic schools in the Canadian province of Ontario. We did not have an obvious place to put this, so I decided that it would be a subpage under religion, as will be the actual religious controversy around The Golden Compass book and probably movie. Of course, the internet decided to go down in that cafe directly before I was able to actually link that bloody page properly, so it now exists in WordPress without being able to be accessed from the public site. Joyous.

The history of public Catholic schools in Canada follows some similar lines to the discrimination against Roman Catholics in the United States, with the whole “allegiance to a foreign power” and “they are undermining our (Protestant) way of life shticks. Though, astonishingly from my American point of view, because the “normal” public schools in Ontario were very much if a Protestant origin, compulsory religious learning for all students was not abolished in what are now Canada’s secular schools until 1969. This is absolutely a product of my own American biases from our history of pretending that we have a separation of church and state. but that seems astonishingly recent to have stopped forcibly propagandizing children into religion. This also gave me an excuse to reference the fact that Irish and Irish-Americans attempted an invasion of colonial Canada in order to get to leave the British to leave Ireland, which is fantastic (the Fenian Raids, for reference).

I also wrote up the description of our COPLAC course this week, although I intended to do more, though I have been doing more unwell than I would like. Regardless, enjoy thine day, dear reader!

Are you not a fan of the repetition of “post” in the title? Neither am I, but it was not worth spending all that much time changing already-accepted lexicon. Anyway, I am not responsible at all for interviews, my partner Lauren is, so I am in a rather awkward position for this blog post. I did get in contact with the Canadian politics professor I knew, but neither him nor his mentor had any relevant knowledge to the case, other than Professor Reichardt’s rather amusing emailed answer that there are public Catholic schools in Canada “because Quebec,” which admittedly does seem to be a feasible answer for a lot of the weirdness (from an American perspective) of Canadian politics. Regardless, that is all I really have for the claim that this blog post counts as my post-interview post (still unenthused with the repetition there). (Really, WordPress? You lack “unenthused” in your database of words? I am thoroughly unimpressed.)

I am greatly disappointed that I cannot include this image for the word “unenthused” due to its not being rights-free, so do enjoy the link above. It is bizarrely amusing.

Regardless, I have been told that 188 does not equal 500 as a word count, so let us discuss my personal views on censorship to fill time in this blog post. Shall we? Actually, I believe I am going to simply rant about something that irritates me, namely the concept of “polite conversation.” My best friend is a liberal lesbian from Texas, and has predictably reserved sensibilities regarding the discussion of sex in any of its forms. Being the shameless creature that I am, this is greatly unfortunate from my point of view. I know full well she has things that she wants and needs to discuss in that matter, but her own shame, enforced by the social conservatism she was raised in and the backwards and controlling views of her father, prevents her from discussing topics of actual importance, instead functioning at best to reference sex and sexual desire through mutually acknowledged potential jokes that neither of us are allowed to make, lest she be made uncomfortable because of the incessant drilling that discussing such things is “wrong.” It took her a year and a half to ask me one thing that had apparently been bothering her that I noticed shortly after we met. Such things are not necessarily upsetting, but rather disappointing, as a parent would refer to a maladjusted child.

The connection here to censorship is one that can be imagined to be completely obvious to many and one that would never have been noted to others. To be told what one is allowed to discuss, to be trained not to engage with “immoral” premises or whatever excuse is given, is very much an internalized censorship of both the mouth and the mind. If one is raised that the discussion of sex is evil, or even simply inappropriate, one will make that a part of their being for the better part of their life, unless the hold of such ideas can be torn asunder. She is also a writer, and while there are coy little references to sex in her works, slightly freer due to the distance from her person, ultimately she has been taught to censor her works because she has been taught to censor and vilify her mind. Of course, it is the duty of a parent to choose how their child is to be raised. But, that duty is an incredibly dangerous one to bestow, and one that cannot be taken lightly.

Perhaps doing a progress report blog post directly after a blog post nominally on interview preparation that was primarily a progress report was not the wisest of idea, but we are here regardless. My previous week in terms of this class was rather irritating, if one is to be honest. I finally got around to attempting to update the site, and promptly had it decide that WordPress does not like me. This previous Tuesday, March 12th, I began to engage with WordPress, as the Project Contract that Lauren and I had drafter stipulates that the first two items of my creation due on the site were due the next day, Wednesday the 13th. (Can we take a moment to note how cumbersome a day name Wednesday is? No? Okay.) I quickly wrote up the first of my two pages due to be completed in WordPress, and watched as WordPress lost said page into the void. I then re-typed up said page, my short autobiography as one of the website’s creators, in Microsoft Word, and then copy and pasted said short autobiography into the site and attempted to publish the updated page. The page would not actually publish properly or even realize that there was text entered into it despite my being able to see said text, and so I spend the next two to three hours (around two hours and forty minutes, as I recall) attempting to get that one bloody page to publish. That was not a particularly enjoyable use of time, and I had other work to do, so I ultimately gave up on attempting to meet that specific deadline.

Now, here I am at home on break, fully aware that I had to get this done, and having avoided going back to working on the site, dreading the same sort of technical issues that had plagued me previous. And, of course, I pulled up my Word document off of One Drive, pasted in my text and the picture of my adorable pet rabbit, Oliver, and had no problems whatsoever. I was simultaneously very much grateful and thoroughly unamused. I have no idea what changed between the two times, though being on my home WiFi instead of Geneseo’s was the singular and most likely wrong idea that I had, but so be it. I now have exactly one half of the pages that were supposed to be due on Wednesday posted to my obvious joy. I even was able to embed my StoryMap JS into that page. Joyous. I will, of course, be working on getting many more pages up soon, and am definitely somewhat frustrated at being slightly behind, even if it was not my fault as far as I am aware, though I should easily be able to catch up this week. Although, my brain telling me to do work right now, and my exhausted body telling me otherwise, are somewhat of an irritance. Regardless, here is a progress report post consisting almost entirely of me complaining about something that I am clueless about, otherwise known as every time one has ever listened to someone talk about technology. Goodnight! (Or whatever is applicable to the precisely one person who actually reads this and is likely not writing at 10:00 pm despite my being sued to staying up later.)

Considering that doing the interviews for this project are not particularly the area I am focused on, assisting in writing up interview questions was somewhat odd and difficult. Being the haphazard sort of speaker that I am, I especially had quite a bit of difficulty wording questions as to not bias the answers, which was sometimes nigh impossible. For instance, I had originally attempted to write a question about why one needs to listen to both sides of a censorship case, even when one side tends toward a perception of “ridiculousness,” or something similar to that, but I was unable to set up that question without it having a rather large slant, so it was deleted. Admittedly, both sides of our case, in Halton have very fair arguments, so that question was more directed toward book censorship in general. Being that it was not directly applicable to our case and impossible to phrase correctly, that question was deleted, but it was certainly a worthwhile lesson in the difficulties of phrasing one’s questions so as not to bias the interviewee or get a biased result. I have little more to say regarding interview preparation specifically, so I suppose I will spend the rest of this post with updates or the like.

At this point, our site it extant, if devoid of content. Interviews with those directly involved with our case seem unfortunately lacking, so at this point expert interview(s) are what we have to fall back on. Our project contract has been written twice over, with the input from Drs. Dierking and Hajo causing the contract to be considerably more functional than it perhaps was before. At the very least, our contract is now much better looking, if nothing else. I have emailed a professor I took a class with last semester whose discipline is Canadian politics, so hopefully that will yield a fruitful interview, though considering his youth and adjunct status, I am only cautiously optimistic. SUNY Geneseo (and I believe the entire SUNY system) has their spring break next week, so I am somewhat hopeful that I will have quite a bit of opportunity to work on my pages for our website over break. I had set several due dates in the contract with that expectation. Admittedly, I already have an overly busy spring break, primarily due to hours that I need to do for one of my education classes, but I should have a decent amount of opportunity to work on the website then. I have the COPLAC class description and my auto-biography pages due on Wednesday, so those should be getting done.

Apologies for that huge block of text. I am exhausted right now, and desperately need my “vacation.” Similarly, I will not be including a picture in this post for the same reason. You understand, right? No? C’est la vie.

I was unsure about how to go about surveying the technological resources available at SUNY Geneseo. Indeed, I was overall unsure about what the content of this blog post was precisely meant to entail. Even so, actually going to our library and speaking with the workers there about what pieces of equipment were available to check out sounded unpleasant, mostly because, at Geneseo, that entails walking up an incredibly steep hill in what are currently rather slippery conditions. So, I went to the website for Geneseo’s Milne Library and started poking around.

After spending way too much time finding the same three pieces of information about the library’s services that were completely useless to me, I stumbled upon our library’s policies page. This page does not sound at all useful, but it does contain the amount of time that items can be checked out for, which just so happens to also mean including a list of available equipment because of the highly variable checkout times. Here, I found quite a few pieces of physical equipment which could possibly be of use to us, as well as the fact that our library apparently allows you to check out a card reader for a four hour period for whatever reason.

The available equipment at Geneseo that could be of some use to us includes three different video cameras that I have no idea what the difference between is, a tripod that hopefully would work for whichever one we used if that was necessary, a snowball microphone, and objects such as various video adapters that sound potentially useful if I had any idea what that meant.

In addition to the physical equipment that Geneseo has available, potentially even more useful, and something I have already used quite a bit both for this project and not, is the vast variety of databases that my school pays for access to. That being said, the period for which databases were useful for gathering information is for us likely over, but they were worth mentioning.

At this point, I am unsure what else to cover here. I suppose I could go over the various online tools that Lauren and I intend to use for the production of our website, including StoryMap JS or Google Maps, Timeline JS, WordPress (which should be obvious considering the nature of this post), Audacity, Coggle, and the like. StoryMap or Google Maps will make a very aesthetically appealing and useful show of the locations of the various challenges to The Golden Compass, with Audacity being useful for potential audio editing, Coggle for a nice visual overview and planning for our website (that will not actually be visible, and simply useful for our purposes), and WordPress for obvious publishing and website creation purposes.

I was unsure about how to go about surveying the technological resources available at SUNY Geneseo. Indeed, I was overall unsure about what the content of this blog post was precisely meant to entail. Even so, actually going to our library and speaking with the workers there about what pieces of equipment were available to check out sounded unpleasant, mostly because, at Geneseo, that entails walking up an incredibly steep hill in what are currently rather slippery conditions. So, I went to the website for Geneseo’s Milne Library and started poking around.

After spending way too much time finding the same three pieces of information about the library’s services that were completely useless to me, I stumbled upon our library’s policies page. This page does not sound at all useful, but it does contain the amount of time that items can be checked out for, which just so happens to also mean including a list of available equipment because of the highly variable checkout times. Here, I found quite a few pieces of physical equipment which could possibly be of use to us, as well as the fact that our library apparently allows you to check out a card reader for a four hour period for whatever reason.

The available equipment at Geneseo that could be of some use to us includes three different video cameras that I have no idea what the difference between is, a tripod that hopefully would work for whichever one we used if that was necessary, a snowball microphone, and objects such as various video adapters that sound potentially useful if I had any idea what that meant.

In addition to the physical equipment that Geneseo has available, potentially even more useful, and something I have already used quite a bit both for this project and not, is the vast variety of databases that my school pays for access to. That being said, the period for which databases were useful for gathering information is for us likely over, but they were worth mentioning.

At this point, I am unsure what else to cover here. I suppose I could go over the various online tools that Lauren and I intend to use for the production of our website, including StoryMap JS or Google Maps, Timeline JS, WordPress (which should be obvious considering the nature of this post), Audacity, Coggle, and the like. StoryMap or Google Maps will make a very aesthetically appealing and useful show of the locations of the various challenges to The Golden Compass, with Audacity being useful for potential audio editing, Coggle for a nice visual overview and planning for our website (that will not actually be visible, and simply useful for our purposes), and WordPress for obvious publishing and website creation purposes.