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I stumbled across this the other day:  from a blog I probably should follow Cheap Healthy Good, “1 Chicken, 17 Healthy Meals, $26 Bucks, No Mayo.” Basically, the challenge was to make a one big chicken last a couple for the bulk of a week’s worth of meals.

I think these are good tips and they sound like pretty good meals, too.  But given that the Mrs. is not that crazy about chicken and I pretty much don’t like eating the same thing two days in a row ever, I doubt I’ll do this exactly.  Still, I like the idea of making something that can be remade into several different things, I like the recipe ideas, and there’s no reason why you couldn’t just freeze the stripped chicken meat and spread these meals out with a mix of things between just chicken.

BTW, as one of the commentators pointed out, not making stock from the left-over carcass is in itself a waste.  But that’s perhaps another food-oriented post.

I went to the “wireside chat” Lawrence Lessig gave Thursday night, a talk mostly (but not entirely, as I’ll mention in a moment) about issues of copyright and remix on the ‘net. You can watch it all yourself now by going to this site; I certainly think it’s a worthwhile viewing experience, especially if you haven’t ever seen Lessig speaking and thinking about copyright and remix.

Three somewhat related thoughts about it all:

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On the way back from Will’s and my recent trip to Alabama, I finally managed to finish reading David Allen’s Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity. I am aware of the irony that it has taken me months of off and on reading to finish this book. Why was I reading it in the first place, you may ask? Well, I picked up this book and, my next read on productivity, Timothy Ferriss’ The 4-Hour Workweek, vaguely thinking that there might be a scholarly project of some sort in there.

Based on flipping through both books and reading their back covers, my initial impression was that these books take opposite views on the notion of “productivity.” Allen’s book, I presumed, was about how to get more things done, while Ferriss’ book was about how to recognize what you don’t need to do so you have more time to do thing things you want to do. I thought (and still do think) that dichotomy is potentially interesting, though don’t ask me now what that paper/presentation/article/web site/book looks like.

And besides that, I thought I might actually learn something about being more productive.

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I’m writing this about 20 minutes before Will and I have to leave for the airport to go back to Detroit while sitting on the patio of my parents’ condo, and it occurs to me that this is pretty much the first time on this trip where it’s been even remotely warm enough to sit outside for any amount of time.  Jeesh.

Will was off school this week and because I’m teaching online (and thus a little more flexible in my whereabouts) and because we didn’t spend as much time with my parents at Christmas as we probably should have, Will and I came down here for a few days.  Annette, unfortunately, still was teaching/working, and (even more unfortunate) watching over a kinda sick dog.

It’s been a pleasant enough visit. The highlight clearly was Mardi Gras, which was a much bigger deal down here in Southern Alabama than I thought.  We didn’t make it into Mobile for the big parades, which was a shame since they claim to be “the original” Mardi Gras (take that, copy-cat New Orleans!), but the local parade through Gulf Shores was a lot of fun. Here’s a link to some picts; here’s my favorite chunks of video, me catching one of the things commonly thrown from the floats, moon pies:

Will and I also spent a very cool afternoon climbing around the battleship USS Alabama and the submarine USS Drum while my parents stayed back and read.  At first, I thought my parents were being party-poopers, but once I got on board, I understood:  it was a lot of fun, but the chutes and ladders and tiny doors mean it’s a little like climbing around in the tubes at Chuck E. Cheese.

And we saw an old fort, and we were at a thing where they shot off an old canon… wow, very military themed, I guess.  I “ran”/walked one day on the beach, which was pretty good exercise albeit kind of cold.

All in all, a nice enough visit, though I don’t know if I’ll be back anytime soon.  My parents are talking about going someplace different next year, and to be honest, I have a hard time making seeing me and Annette making our own vacation kind of trip here. But the moon pies are good.

Via Will Richardson’s blog and his entry “Transformative Technology?  Really?” about a video from a company (maybe the company?  I don’t know) that makes “smart boards,” those touch screen white boards where you can project all kinds of stuff.  Here’s a link to the video (I don’t think there’s a way to embed it). The video shows elementary school teachers using the board and discussing its use in mock interview-style discussion.

It’s all rather bothersome in at least two different ways. First, I swear they say “ease” or “easy” at least 30 times in this 5 minute video.  Second, the uses they demonstrate of this board aren’t exactly “transformative:”  really, it seems to replicate classic elementary school pedagogy, with students sitting in neat rows, the teacher pointing at something on the board, and, instead of writing with chalk and erasing with an eraser, the teacher just uses his hand!  Wow!  And to the extent that the students are actually involved in using these things, it is to do stuff that would just as easily be done on a whiteboard or a chalkboard.

It’s all rather odd because I know these smart boards can actually be interesting tools.  They have them at Will’s school (none in Pray-Harrold as far as I know, and I don’t think there will be any coming into the building anytime soon), and, from what I’ve seen, Will and his teachers use them a lot to project some sort of web-based thing, to project some sort of slide show, and/or to demonstrate something on the computer desktop the teacher wants to show.  The touch screen makes it a lot easier to do these things than it is with a computer hooked up to a projector. And at Will’s school, I think the students play around with them as much the teachers– at least that’s what I’ve seen.

After seeing this, I immediately thought of this recent CHE article, “Class Produces Parody of ‘The Office’ to Highlight Challenges of Teaching With Technology.” This one does include a YouTube video:

It’s funny because it’s true, and the smartboard promo video is also not funny because it’s true.

I wrote an essay a while back about chalkboards as a technology, and I quoted Larry Cuban in it as saying something along the lines of teachers don’t change the way they do things as a result of technology just because they can.  Rather, teachers change the way they do things as a result of technology if they perceive that new use of technology as being beneficial to their teaching– both for their students and themselves.

I guess I’d amend/revise that slightly. If teachers aren’t willing or aren’t able to really rethink the way that technologies can transform their teaching, then they shouldn’t bother with the expense and hassle of things like “smart” boards.  And if teachers want it all to be so “easy” that they don’t have to think about it all, well, that’s kinda dumb.  I worry about this at my own institution where I see some of my colleagues wanting things like “smart” boards and other bells and whistles not because they would do anything significantly or meaningfully different because it’s cool.  Kind of like that Monty Python sketch about the button that goes “bing.”

Actually, that University of Denver video has some good advice for getting started with teaching with technology:  get the students involved, allow for more collaboration, and don’t be boring.  Of course, the professor at the end of that video also talks about trying out “those clickers.”

There’s an interesting article in CHE right now, “Scholars Turn Their Attention to Attention,” about various research and perspectives on multitasking– or rather, the myth of multitasking.  There must be something in the air about multitasking and the bane of every non-multitasker’s existence, talking on the phone while driving.  Just yesterday, I was listening to NPR’s “Talk of the Nation” to US Secretary of Transportation Ray LaHood sounding a little like a crazy old man about the need to keep both hands on the wheel at all times.  I do not understand how someone can text and drive at the same time, I don’t think bus drivers or truckers ought to be talking on their cell phones (unless they have something like a head set), and I try to use my headphones when I’m driving and talking on the phone.  But doing anything while driving is pontentially dangerous, including perfectly legal (and even encouraged!) things like eating, drinking (I’ll bet spilled coffee in the lap is responsible for many more auto accidents than cell phone class), talking to others, listening to super-duper loud music, etc.

Wait, I got distracted.  Where was I?  Oh yeah, multitasking….

The CHE article is good and probably worth teaching because it covers the issue from a variety of different angles– certainly not just from the “multitasking is bad” one.  There’s some kind of information here about the “history” of research on multitasking and various experiments, but I have to say (as someone who doesn’t do this kind of research) that a lot of this seems kind of like parlor games to me.  For example:

As far back as the 1890s, experimental psychologists were testing people’s ability to direct their attention to multiple tasks. One early researcher asked her subjects to read aloud from a novel while simultaneously writing the letter A as many times as possible. Another had people sort cards of various shapes while counting aloud by threes.

Well, duh, but isn’t that more like making someone say the alphabet backwards during a sobriety test or something?  I don’t know if that necessarily tests a person’s ability to do more than one thing at once though giving most attention to a single task.  For example, as I am writing this post, I am listening to my iPhone (REM right now) and I was just interrupted to take a phone call from my wife.  That’s multitasking, but it’s not like what these people seem to mean by multitasking.

Or I guess that’s the problem here– I’m not sure there’s a very clear definition of what multitasking is.  For example, part of the argument that comes up against multitasking is that increasingly old school argument about no laptops in the classroom.  Here’s an extreme example of that:

“I’m teaching a class of first-year students,” says David E. Meyer, a professor of psychology at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. “This might well have been the very first class they walked into in their college careers. I handed out a sheet that said, ‘Thou shalt have no electronic devices in the classroom.’ … I don’t want to see students with their computers out, because you know they’re surfing the Web. I don’t want to see them taking notes. I want to see them paying attention to me.”

I don’t know who Meyers is or what his scholarship says, but that last line– I want them paying attention to me– seems pretty telling and egocentric.  And  it’s this potential lack of paying attention to me, the professor/teacher/sage on the stage/keeper o’ wisdom that has got most people like Meyers thinking like this.  Don’t get me wrong; I will sometimes ask students to close up their laptops to pay attention to something, especially if it is one of those times I have to go into a five minute lecture “about important stuff for the class” mode.  But generally, I don’t want to be the center of the class, and if my students find it easy to be distracted by Facebook (or whatever), then it’s probably a combination of me being boring or them not wanting to be in class.

One more thing:  I don’t think multitasking is even remotely a phenomenon that has come abut only with the age of the Internet.  I grew up in a multitasking household.  The television was ALWAYS on when I was a kid, and now when I am home visiting my parents, three sisters, and all the kids and in-laws (I think it’s 17 0r 18 people total), it is not at all uncommon for their to be three different televisions in different rooms but still within sight, all tuned to different channels.  My parents always read the newspaper or magazine while watching TV (or with the TV on– I’m not sure the difference was ever very clear when I was a kid), and layered over that would always be some kind of conversation.  When I go back home now, all of my adult siblings and their spouses will sit around watching TV, playing some kind of game, checking laptops or cell phones, watching children, eating snacks, and planning the next meal, all at the same time.

I mean, really:  in “real life,” who just “pays attention?”

#1:  Clearly, there was not a woman on the development team. Already all the the “feminine hygiene” jokes have been made, and I am quite confident that a woman on the team would have suggested the “problem” with the iPad name.  But beyond that, note that this intro is a bunch of white guys.

#2: I still await a device where I can store, read and make notes on PDFs. I think.  As I have commented/posted about before, I don’t read that many “trade store” books of the type you’d read with iBooks or Kindle, but a device where I could access the piles and piles of marked-up PDFs of journal articles I use to teach would be very VERY useful to me.  I don’t think this does that yet.  On the other hand, since this thing is tied to the open-source ePub platform, I suspect that there will be some way to convert PDFs relatively easily relatively soon.

#3: I think this is more of a “netbook” than it is a giant iPod. I say that because you can add a keyboard and because the keyboard that’s built in for stuff seems pretty workable, and also because I think you’d use this pretty much the same way you’d use a netbook:  some surfing, some reading, watch some movies, some email, some facebook, some games, etc., etc., all in a very portable package.  Every situation I can imagine using a netbook would be a good one for the iPad, I think.  Or maybe the iTouch is just a tiny netbook.

#4: I’m pretty sure I want one. And I am also willing to be one of the first kids on the block with one at this point, even though I am well-aware that something much better will come out in about a year.  I want to play around with it and do some more research first, but the $500 entry-level price point surprised me.  Anyway, do me a favor and talk it up as a good idea with my wife.

From a couple of different places, I came across this Mashable article, “Your Brain Can’t Handle Your Facebook Friends,” suggests that according to Dunbar’s number, the number of people you can really be “friends” with is 150.  This reminds me of article by Clive Thompson in the current issue of WIRED, “In Praise of Obscurity,” in which he talks about how when an audience becomes too large, it no longer is “social.”  He uses the example of a popular Twitter-er (???) named Maureen Evans who started tweeting recipes, became hugely popular (13,000 followers), and said the conversation between users just stopped. I’ll post a link once WIRED puts one up, probably when the next issue comes out.

First off, I blogged about this very phenomenon back in 2007 here, in talking about both Facebook and also EMUTalk.org and my struggling (dying?) “Blogs as Writerly Spaces” project.  (Perhaps I can count this post as something that will allow me to check off “worked on scholarship today” from my to do list.)  As I noted back then, since I think the readership of this blog is generally pretty small, I don’t need a lot of rules; on the other hand, with EMUTalk.org, especially when it was routinely getting 600-1000 hits a day (that’s fallen off to about half of that now), I did indeed need to set up rules.  In that sense, the Dunbar number seems to be about a threshold for organization as much as anything else.  If you have a group of people who like to play ultimate frisbee or pick-up basketball or softball every Friday night at a particular park and that group is less than 150 or so people, then you probably don’t need much in the ways of “rules.”  But if that group gets above 150, then I suspect you need to start forming a “league” with organized teams, schedules, etc.

Second, this all begs once again the definition of “friend,” something that has been a little easier to sort out with Facebook as of late thanks to its new “list” feature.  I think in the context of Facebook, people have basically over-valued and/or misinterpreted the word “friend.” In “real life,” I think of a friend as someone I either know quite well and engage in activities with on a regular basis (e.g., family friends, golfing friends, people I invite to my house for a party or something, etc.), people I know pretty well but only catch up with once in a while (e.g., many/most people at work, friends who live some distance away, etc.), or people I still know but are from a more distant past and who I haven’t necessarily even spoken with in some time.  This last category is a big one on Facebook:  we all have “friended” people from high school or college who we haven’t seen or spoken with in decades and who we aren’t especially interested in reconnecting with in “real life” again now, but who are still a kind of friend.

I have “real life” friends on Facebook, but besides “real” friends, most of my Facebook friends fall into the categories of “colleagues in my field,” people at EMU, and/or students.  No offense to any of these folks, but that y’all aren’t really my friends in the real world friend sense, right?

Third, I guess the other thing that comes up especially in the Thompson article is my concept/understanding of who I am “speaking” with when I post online, be that space on Facebook, Twitter, this or some other blog.  This may be kind of “old skool,” but I still work from the assumption that anything I post online has the potential to be read by anyone on the planet; therefore, I would never post any sort of personal thing which I would be concerned about some stranger reading.  You’re not going to get any “weird rash on my hands not going away” posts from me (btw, I have no rashes).  And if I post something like “ate tuna sandwich,” it is only because I don’t really care if anyone knows that I ate a tuna sandwich.

The tricky thing about this is trying to figure out those borders between the actually personal, the things you really would only tell to close friends, and everything else.  This is nothing new, of course; what makes it a little different now is that the sheer volume of people on networks like Facebook means that there is inevitably a learning curve for both writers and readers about the shifting definition of “Too Much Information.”  I mean, I have FB “friends” who do seem to think that posting about that mysterious rash is fair game; conversely, I also have FB “friends” who would comment on my lunch selection “Ew, TMI.”  So it goes with emerging medias, right?

BTW, today I’m going to have left-over pork loin for lunch.  If it isn’t too freezer-burned.

Thought (frustration, really) #1: Reagan, both Bushes, and Clinton never had close to 60 votes in the Senate and they got stuff done.  What is wrong with the current Democratic leadership– Obama, but also the folks in Congress– that they can’t get things done?  Haven’t these people done this before?

Thought #2: I think the main reason why the Democrats lost the senate race in Massachusetts (and btw, I think they lost rather than the Republicans winning) boils down to “hubris.”  Democrat leadership in DC and in Boston simply assumed that it wouldn’t be possible for a Republican in bluer than blue Mass. to win “the Kennedy seat” in the Senate and they assumed they could have run a potted plant for the job and win.  Hubris, and the lesson should be to take every election seriously and don’t assume anything.

Thought #3: I am (or at least vote) Democrat for all sorts of different reasons, not the least of which is I identify with the progressive ideals, the empathy for my fellow citizens of the country and the world, the thoughtfulness of the approach, etc., etc.  The Democrats (at least the current version) is the “thinking person’s party.”  In contrast, the Republicans– especially in this particular instance of debating health care and the senate race in Mass.– tap into the “reptilian brain” that is in all of us and below the levels of reason.  The Republicans know that people respond unconsciously and powerfully to fear and self-interests.  And I have to say I think that the Democrats are going to have to make at least a nod to the reptile brain that is (unfortunately) a bit too forward in too many Americans if they are going to hold in 2010 and/or win in 2012.

I changed my header to this picture on a damp and melting snowy Martin Luther King day.  Needless to say, my actual view right now is different from this….