I've been beaten to the punch at Ivan

I’m still in “vacation mode” because the in-laws are here and my wife and I just returned from a getaway to Niagara Falls— oops! too much information for Ivan “the worst ‘not his real name’ name ever” Tribble, at least according to an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education, “Bloggers Need Not Apply.”

Jeff, Jenny, Collin, KF at Planned Obsolescence, and many others have already said what needs to be said, so I’ll just add a few more thoughts:

  • Tribble does have a point in that there are a lot of bloggers out there, academic and otherwise, who are not as aware of the potential downfalls of their vast and unintended audience as they perhaps ought to be. Lots of people have lost their jobs as a result of their blogs, and it is probably true that others have been passed over for jobs because of their blogging. Of course, most of the academic blogs I know of that share a bit too much– ah… problematic “personal” information– are anonymous anyway (and I’ve certainly complained about the problems I have with anonymous academic blogging in the past). So, assuming that the anonymous academic blogger applying for a job isn’t going to be promoting his or her anonymous blog in a cover letter or on a campus visit, Tribble et al could have easily hired the exact kind of blogger he and his colleagues were trying to avoid and not even know it.
  • I don’t know what field Tribble is in (though I must say that he sure sounds like a pretty old-timey/traditional Literature– with a capital “L”– kind of guy to me), but in my field, I’m pretty sure that we’d look quite favorably on a candidate who kept a blog. Many of the folks I list as comp/rhet bloggers are doctoral students or newly minted Ph.Ds, and I’m betting that they’ll land decent jobs.
  • Finally, Tribble reminds me of one final piece of unsolicited advice I’d like to offer in my role as The Happy Academic: while the academic job market is extremely tight, always remember that job candidates have to evaluate the people who are doing the hiring, too. Afterall, there is a decent enough chance that you will have to spend the rest of your working life with these people, so you had better have a sense of what they’re like. I have had MLA interviews with a variety of different schools where, about half-way through that half hour sitting in a hotel room someplace, I thought to myself “there is no way I would be willing to work with you people.” I freely admit that it’s perhaps a bit too easy for me to say this now that I’m happy and tenured, but I guess what I’m getting at is I’m pretty sure that Tribble and his colleagues at “a small liberal arts college in the Midwest” wouldn’t want to hire me, and I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t want to work with them.

Update:
Here’s a link to the newsgroup style discussion about all this on the Chronicle site. I stumbled across it while looking at Clancy’s site, though I don’t think I have the same sort of patience as Clancy does to actually read what people wrote there….

Poor Writing turns out to be "costly"/More teachers blogging

There were two things I found interesting in the July 6 NCTE Inbox.

First, it turns out that writing instruction might be important because bad writing costs businesses too much money. Shocking news, huh? Here’s a somewhat troubling passage from the Business Week article that the NCTE folks link to:

In a conference call interview last week, Kerrey, Huckabee, and Gaston Caperton — a former West Virginia governor who now leads the College Board — said many of the costs when state employees cannot express themselves clearly are hard to pin down. E-mail, which is so easy that workers can fire something off without thinking it through, may compound the problem.

“Increasingly as more things are done electronically, or via e-mail or blackberry, I think we tend to almost get even more sloppy,” Huckabee said. “The truth is we need to get clear and concise. That adds to productivity.”

Ah yes, it’s that darn technology that is screwing up writing. Never mind the fact that electronic formats like email represent a significant percentage of the writing that people in the business world actually do.

All of this is based on a report, which is available online here (pdf). There’s been quite a bit of talk about all this on the WPA-L mailing list, and I think most of that conversation has been productive, though no one has really talked about what counts (or doesn’t) as “good writing.” Not that we could ever be completely clear about what is or isn’t “good writing,” but I suspect that some of the problem is what counts as good writing for some folks is bad writing to other folks.

But I also have to wonder is what’s the point of comparison? Has there ever been a commission or organization that has determined that writing skills (or math skills or science skills or whatever) among members of a particular group (state workers, students, teachers, or whoever) are good or even adequate? I doubt it. And if that’s the case, if writing has always been important and if workers have always been bad at it, well, what does being bad at writing mean then?

The second piece I was interested in was an article about teachers keeping blogs. The article NCTE Inbox is linking to was published in the Palm Beach Post (I presume Florida). In the NCTE blurb about the article, they highlight Will Richardson’s work at Weblogg-ed, as well they should. But I was a lot more interested in this part:

Word of mouth can be powerful as pioneering teachers talk about the benefits to co-workers.

That’s why more than 300 of the 7,000 teachers in Macomb County, Mich., are already registered bloggers on a site called visitmyclass.com. Blog names range from the eloquent (“A Literary Escape”) to the pointed (“Ms. Klosowski’s Helpful Suggestions for GED Improvement”).

Chris Burnett, a self-described technophobic language-arts teacher in Macomb County, used a blog for the first time this past year to engage her students.

Rather than hang their writing around the room, she’s publishing the musings of one of her eighth-grade classes on her blog. Readers can share their thoughts in postings on the blog.

Macomb county is the northern suburbs of Detroit, and I swear that the name Chris Burnett rings a bell…. Anyway, this might be an interesting piece to bring up when I teach 516 again.

What the Grokster decision might (or might not) mean to me

Jim Porter and Martine Courant Rife have a paper on the WIDE resource at Michigan State about the recent Supreme Court decision against Grokster and what it might mean for universities. It’s interesting reading. Three thoughts:

  • Sure, I downloaded some music (illegally) from sources like limewire and napster back in the day, but I gave up on it pretty quickly. I thought that the time it took to download illegal tunes and the poor quality of the dowloads just wasn’t worth it. I have been happy with what I can get from iTunes though. It’s not free, but it is reasonably priced, it’s clearly legal, and the sound quality is good. I dunno, maybe it’s because I’m middle-aged and (reasonably) well paid, but I am just not willing to put up with the hassle of free downloads.
  • During my recent travels (I think while I was in southern Minnesota), I heard this story on “On the Media,” an NPR news show about (duh) “the media.” In this report about the decision, the legal expert basically suggests that a) the Supreme Court’s decision was actually a “non-decision” in that what this decision really does is put off the question of “legitimate” file sharing for another day, and b) it boils down to the idea that Grokster (et al) were ruled against because they were kind of jerks. Here’s a quote from legal expert Michael Madison about that:

    “I have a lot of confidence that firms that are already in mature markets, say for example Google, which is a company that takes advantage of intellectual property rights in a number of complex ways, Google is likely going to be able to innovate without a lot of concern, in my opinion, from this Grokster ruling. What the court is really trying to do in a not particularly elegant way is distinguish good guys from bad guys.”

  • Personally, I’d like to see the Supreme Court rule on copyright and such for universities once and for all. Porter and Rife write in the summary of their paper:

    Clearly universities are not promoting copyright infringement by their students, as were Grokster and StreamCast – and universities could just as easily use the Court’s opinion in Grokster to defend its practices. However, the recording and film industries are likely to use the ruling as a basis for litigation holding universities responsible for copyright infringements by students – and such action could well have an unfortunate chilling effect on universities.

    I am no copyright attorney, that’s for sure, and I haven’t studied this stuff to the extent that other people (like these two) have. But I guess I’d still like to see a test case where some copyright holder goes after a university for promoting “fair use.” I have to think that the courts, even the conservative ones, would value the promotion of ideas at a university more than the film industry. And I guess I’d also like to see this ruling because, as far as I can tell, no one really understands what is or isn’t “fair use” of copyrighted materials. Maybe if there was a test case, some of this confusion could be cleared up.

Three minor thoughts about this whole Fulkerson thing….

Thought #1:

While I admire greatly the earnestness associated with the posts on this this Fulkerson essay in the CCCs, I just can’t bring myself to read that essay right now. I’m sort of in summer break mode, and it seems too much like work to me. Get back to me in a week or so.

Thought #2:

If I were in charge of this carnival (and obviously this is not the case), I might be inclined to get people to think about/write about the article “The Ecoomics of Authorship: Online Paper Mills, Student Writers, and First-Year Composition” by Kelly Ritter. Of course, I haven’t read this article yet either (see thought #1), but it sounds more interesting to me. At least the title.

Thought #3:

I sure hope Collin does something like this with the new and forthcoming version of the CCCs Online. I think it would be super-duper cool to have a forum where readers could comment on articles in the print journal in a format like this.

Bloggers in the night…

In some sort of weird and happy suprise of random browsing (the type that comes from killing time on the ‘net when I should be doing something productive), I came across The Synecdochic Prof’s blog. Apparently, we were in the same general neighborhood last week, missing each other by a few days. The Prof was apparently doing “field work” of some sort. Me, I was a tourist….

Happy July 4 (more or less…)

Will watching the fake calliope

You know, it’s kind of a scary time right now, if you ask me. Sandra O’Connor retiring from the Supreme Court prepares the way for a potentially ugly political battle and it will give us a chance to see W.’s stripes clearly. If he’s a “uniter,” as he claims to be, he’ll pick a moderate kind of like O’Connor. If he’s not, he won’t. Guess which one I’m guessing on.

And Iraq goes badly and the trouble with Social Security reform and the rest of the world hates us, blah blah blah….

But hey; let’s have a parade!

The annual Ypsilanti July 4 parade featured all the usual sorts of things and was lots of fun for one and all. I’ll just offer three quick thoughts for now:

  • They should have had a lot more candy throwers and they should have had them earlier. The kids were getting pretty antsy that no candy was being tossed until about 45 minutes into the thing.
  • The theme this year was “salute to the military” and here’s one particularly disturbing image:
    Marching kiddies
    These are members of the “junior Marines,” kids of about 10 or so marching in fatigues and (presumably) being convinced to enlist when the time comes. Right when they marched by us, an old B-17 or some such plane flew right over us. Annette said later “Gosh, I felt like we were at war or something; which we are.”
  • But I don’t want to dwell on the negative here– really, it was overall good and clean American fun. And because he said he wanted it to be on my blog, here’s a picture of Andre and family:

Andre et al

Did you miss me? (A round-up of what I have clearly missed….)

We’re back in town after a family trip out west (which was a lot of fun). I’m actually only going to be here a couple of days before leaving again, but it’s nice to be home just for a bit, awake from sleeping in my own bed, and sitting here and drinking my own coffee at my own desk.

Anyway, here’s kind of a round-up post of some of the things that I have appeared to have missed:

  • There’s a “textual carnival” reading of Richard Fulkerson’s “Composition at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century,” from the June 2005 (56.4) issue of College Composition and Communication. My guess is that my copy of the CCCs is in the held mail that won’t arrive here until tomorrow at the earliest. Oh well, I’ll catch up on that one later. I’ll link here to Clancy’s entry on this, but Collin, Jenny, Derek and probably others have posted on this bit as well.
  • There was an article published on the Inside Higher Ed site called “Collegiality — the Tenure Track’s Pandora’s Box” by Mary McKinney. McKinney– who isn’t a tenure-track academic herself (I don’t think) but a psychologist who “coaches” people seeking tenure (?)– is basically suggesting that people seeking tenure ought to work hard at getting along with co-workers. Wow, shocking advice. Nowhere in the article does she point out that a) to get tenure, you should first and foremost do the work required by that particular institution because being the nicest person in the world who doesn’t do the work in terms of scholarship, teaching, and service will still not get tenure; b) the standards for tenure vary wildly, so the tenure-seeking faculty member should inquire about the local standards and not pay as much attention to the “lore” of things like “publish or perish;” c) the idea that one should “try to get along with your co-workers” merely reminds us that being a college faculty member is a lot like actually having a job; and, finally d) McKinney (and the many folks who comment on this) doesn’t mention the fact that (according to the AAUP, I think) something like 90% of folks who apply for tenure actually get it so you shouldn’t stress it too much.
  • I’ve gotten some good feedback from folks on my Chronicle article, which has been nice. The EMU PR folks reported my publication in a mass email to people and they described the CHE as an “international” publication. Well, I don’t know about that, but it’s nice to now that the PR people must obviously read CHE…. Oh, and thanks a bunch to Bob, who sent me a PDF version of my article, which I’ll post here for now and on that other entry later.
  • Jeff and Jenny have been doing a little urban pioneering in Detroit as of late.
  • The TV fan in me enjoyed this post and this post at Johndan’s blog.
  • Mike has a belated post about some of what he saw at the Computers and Writing Conference. He’s excused for being late, though; he’s been working on his dissertation….
  • Dr. B. seems frustrated about this gaming conference she went to. From what she reports, I would be too.

I’m sure there’s more, but that’s enough to go look at for the time-being. Besides, I have to get ready to go to the July 4 parade.

Western Vacation, Part 8: The Badlands, Wall Drug, the end.




Will studying

Originally uploaded by steven_d_krause.

As I’m typing this, I’m happily sitting in my living room after watching The Wizard of Oz on Turner Movie Classics (followed by a 13 minute a silent version that was made in 1910), thinking about Dorothy’s famous words, “there’s no place like home.â€? Ah yes….

Anyway, a quick recap of the last couple of days of our western adventure:

After a start later than we would have preferred, we toured through Badlands National Park. Annette and I both remember our last trip through the park quite vividly. It was 1996, on our way out to my first tenure-track job at Southern Oregon, and we drove through the park from Wall, SD very early in the morning. It was a spooky and ethereal drive with odd colors against the sand/rock formations and birds that kept dive-bombing us and getting smacked by the windshield of the car.

This time, not as much, but it was still pretty cool. Will liked a ranger’s lesson on fossils and the fossil trail (notice him studying the model of a fossil under the plastic dome along the trail in the photo) and the views through the park were still pretty cool.

And then it was to Wall Drug. For me, it was the perfect way to end the trip: a kitschy tourist trap that has risen to the distinction of “historic� destination. I’m guessing that a good half of the people reading this message have “dug� Wall Drug at one point or another, and I’m here to tell you that it certainly hasn’t changed much since you’ve been there. I do think there are a lot fewer billboards than there used to be.

Anyway, it was fun, though by the time we got there, Annette and Will were both sick of me taking pictures of them, which is why you won’t see much of them in the pictures I have of Wall Drug on Flickr (part of the whole trip group). Except for this picture:

After that, it was drive drive drive drive. South Dakota is a big-assed state with not a whole lot there, and even going in the low 80s pretty much the whole way, it took us about six hours before we were through it all. We stopped in Albert Lea, Minnesota for the night last night, and then got up first thing and came into town tonight. And here I am.

Just a few of the things I learned from this trip:

  • I am feeling way WAY out of shape and I’m looking forward to getting back into a regular workout plan sometime very soon.
  • It is surprisingly easy to get Internet access. All three of the hotels we stayed in had it in our rooms, and it was easy enough to get at the YMCA camp, too.
  • Altitude can really mess with you a lot more than you might think.
  • I think snowglobes aren’t as popular as they once were; I was only able to find four ones that I thought were cheap enough to justify getting.
  • If we can ever get back into decent shape and deal with the altitude, I’d love to spend some time hiking around the Rockies in the summer.
  • I have a fun family and a lot of cool nephews and brothers-in-law and sisters and parents and such.

Western Vacation, Part 7: The Black Hills

I would have liked to have been on the road by now, but considering the day we had yesterday, I suppose it’s reasonable that all of us are a little slow moving this morning. Let me tell ya: we did the Black Hills yesterday, did it as much as it could possibly be done, wrung it dry, and a good time was had by one and all.

I’m not sure why– maybe because we did so much– but I don’t have a lot of scenic photos to post here. Oh well; you’ve seen most of the things not in the pictures.

After toast and doughnuts in the hotel, we headed off to Mount Rushmore with a first stop in the touristy-junk town of Keystone. Lots of gift shops and rock shops and such; Will spent some of his own money, carefully choosing some taffy.

Here’s Will and Annette on the street at Keystone.

Then on to the star attraction, Mount Rushmore. I don’t have any good pictures of Rushmore, at least on the digital camera, and, as much as I like taking pictures, I thought about not taking any at all. I mean, haven’t all of us seen Mount Rushmore enough, even if you haven’t actually been there?

The last time I was here (which was in 1996 when Annette and I were moving out to Oregon from Bowling Green), we only stopped at Rushmore for about 15-20 minutes, long enough to park, fight the big crowds on the main viewing platform, and have a full-frontal view of the four heads. This time around, we took the hike around a trail that takes you by the artists’ studio and many other viewing sites. That was pretty cool, and we managed to get some exercise, too.

From Rushmore it was on to the Crazy Horse Memorial, the never-to-end family business mountain carving project. It’s been going on for around 75 years, and I don’t think there’s any way that they’ll finish it in the next 75 years. Regardless, it’s still a pretty impressive site, a memorial for Native American peoples and the work of a very stubborn family who have refused government assistance.

Here’s Will standing by a cool display of glass beads in the museum part of things.

Rushmore has been done for a long time obviously, so that’s all about product. Crazy Horse is all about evolving process. Annette is certain that the progress on the mountain has been noticeable, but don’t ask me to tell you the difference between what we saw in ’96 and now. Well, okay. the face is done. But the cool part about Crazy Horse is the idea of it, and also seeing the process evolve, with the visitor center buildings being added on to in any which way. It’ll be interesting to see this thing in another 10 years.

Then it was lunch at the Mount Rushmore Brew Pub in Hill City, which was slow service but good food and very good beer and it was raining and hailing out, so it was a good time to sit around inside. Funny story: Will and Annette ordered sweet potato fries, and high school kid waitress and the young groovy couple sitting a few tables away were both fascinated by the idea that one would eat something like that.

Then it was on to Reptile Gardens, which is a private zoo sort of thing just off of the road that features a lot of (guess what?) reptiles. They had a lot of snakes and such that I hadn’t seen in other zoos before, including komodo dragons and (what they claimed was) the largest salt water crocodile in the Western Hemisphere, an 18 or so footer named Maniac. Let me tell ya, that was one big assed crocodile. They had prairie dogs and giant tortoises (in the old days, they apparently let the kids ride them), and we saw a pretty good snake handling show.

Oh yeah– they also had these trained chickens who would do stuff like play basketball (as the one in the picture is doing at the top of the page), or play tic-tac-toe or give you answers to a series of yes or no questions. It was all skinner box kind of stuff– the chickens peck at a target and then they get a reward– but it was pretty funny, and no, I don’t think it was all that cruel. They had a sign explaining the care that they give the chickens, and they pointed out that these chickens actually live a “full lifeâ€? (in other words, they aren’t dinner).

Then we managed to get kind of lost around Rapid City, which actually wasn’t that bad because we got lost in the good part of town. My impressions of Rapid City improved a great deal.

Then we went to the Black Hills Caverns, one of the many cave tours in the Black Hills. This was Annette’s idea, but Will and I liked it a lot too. The thing that was most, well, cute about the whole thing was the “mom-and-pop� nature of the operation. For example, our tour guide (and Annette and Will and I were the only people on the tour) was a high school student from Sturgis who told us stories about bike week and living in the Black Hills in between her rehearsed tour banter.

Then it was time for mini golf (always fun, of course) and then for later dinner at a place called Boston Pizza, which is actually a Canadian chain and has as much to do with Boston as Outback Steakhouse has to do with Australia.

Whew. That was a long day.

Now it’s time to get ready for the road.

Western Vacation, Part 6: Top of the world (and then in South Dakota)

We said goodbye to the rest of the family and left the YMCA camp first thing Thursday morning and started our day off with a drive through Rocky Mountain National Park. (Note to self: if we ever head back this way during the summer, it might be worthwhile to think about staying at Grand Lake Lodge). The park was definitely one of those places where I wish we had more time and where I wish I was in better shape to hike because it was unbelievably beautiful and “sublime.�

We took the “lazyâ€? tour, the Trail Ridge Road, a white knuckle driving experience open only from Memorial day until the fall which crosses the mountains at over 12,000 feet. According to the Rocky Mountain National Park web site, it is the highest paved road in the United States. I guess that’s true; all I know for sure is that you are way the hell up there when you are on this thing– I mean WAY up there, way above the tree line, thick snow drifts on either side of the road kind of high up there. The road itself, which is kind of bumpy and a bit suspect in spots, is all switchbacks and sheer drops of God only knows how many feet with no shoulders and few guard rails. Annette spent much of the ride saying “height issues, height issues!â€?

But like I said, it was really beautiful. If we ever come back to Colorado, especially for a summer trip, I think one of the best places to go would be to Estes Park (which is on the eastern side of the park) or the previously mentioned Grand Lake, and one of the best things to do would be to hike around the national park. Of course, I’d need to be in much better shape and many pounds lighter (as the picture here would suggest)….

After the park (and its fine gift store where I bought a lovely snow globe), we drove along a pretty mountain stream and pretty much all downhill for about 40 miles and then started north to Rapid City, South Dakota. I have only three things to say about this six to eight hour part of our drive:

  • For some reason, I found Cheyenne, Wyoming to be about the most confusing and misleading place to exit off of the interstate ever. I saw signs that suggested a variety of lunch options right off the road at a particular exit, but none of them seemed to be there. We ended up driving through Cheyenne, much of which struck me as a dreadful place.
  • I suppose there was some beauty in the quintessential “Western Range Landâ€? scenery that is eastern Wyoming, its wide open spaces, rolling hills, grasses, and cattle. But after about 20 minutes of driving through this, I kept wondering who in the hell would voluntarily live in the middle of nowhere?
  • This is Dick Cheney country. Sorta.

Anyway, we’ve ended up in Rapid City, our staging ground for our tour of the Black Hills Friday. It promises to be a fun albeit “touristyâ€? filled day– Mount Rushmore, Reptile Gardens, some mini-golf, some caves, etc.

I’ve already found Rapid City kind of frustrating and skanky. We got to our hotel after a longer than planned drive (and it’s a nice hotel with a pool and good Internet access, though there are some people above us who seem to think that a good way to have fun is to stomp around loudly and repeatedly shower), and I went shopping for some food and beverages in our room while Annette and Will went to the pool. My most obvious shopping option was as Wal-Mart “Super-Center.� Now, I think that Wal-Mart is a very very evil corporation, and I cannot honestly remember the last time I was in one of these places. Seriously, it may be about 5 years. But like I said, with no Target or Whole Foods in site, my options where limited.

My Wal-Mart shopping experience was dominated by two thoughts. First, “wow, is this place ever tacky and just unpleasant.� Second, “holy shit, the stuff in here sure is cheap!�

Unfortunately, South Dakota is one of these stupid states where you can get beer in a grocery store but to get wine, you have to go to a liquor store. After some dicey directions, I found my way to a liquor store that had fewer wine selections than the Farmer Jack in Ann Arbor (and that’s saying something, believe me!). It was in a neighborhood of check cashing stores, pawn shops, and “casinos,� which in South Dakota seem to be seedy little operations that look from the outside a lot more like porn book stores than the kind of more glitzy casinos I’m used to in Las Vegas or even Detroit. Kind of weird, though with a seven year old in tow, I don’t think we’ll get to find out the mystery behind these South Dakota casinos.

As before, the pictures are at my flick site, at least for the time being.