Month: September 2005

Tiny Houses

See the Tumbleweed Tiny House Company for all of your tiny house needs.

Actually, I was channel-surfing this past weekend and I stumbled across a show on the Home and Garden network about “small spaces” that was featuring one of these houses and a couple who lived in one of them. I think the house they featured was the one described as “XS House.” Check out the descriptions of these houses to get an idea what I mean. “XS House” is 75 square feet, and it featured (at least on the HGTV show) a sleeping loft for two (which, with the low headroom, looked a hell of a lot like a coffin to me), a hot plate for a “kitchen,” and a “composting toilet” that was really a small metal garbage can with a lid you can open with a foot pedal– the kind of thing you might see in a doctor’s office. I’m sorry, but that’s a deal-breaker for me. I’m not going to squat and shit into a tiny garbage can in my tiny house.

Still, I could see some of the other designs as a cabin in the woods kind of vacation home or as a studio/office space in the backyard. As long there was a real toliet installed or at least nearby in the “big house.”

Reining in grades, reining in "the university?"

I’ve come across three kinda short-ish, unrelated, and still somehow connected articles about the “state of the university” and what that might mean in terms of where where we’re going in the short, medium, and long(ish) terms.

First, there’s this CNN article about Princeton trying to control the percentage of “As” it gives out to students. Predictably, the administration wants to give out fewer “excellent” grades.

Second, there’s this interesting discussion in Inside Higher Ed: “What Should the U.S. Commission Do?” As the first paragraph of the article says:

On Monday, U.S. Education Secretary Margaret Spellings announced the creation of a national Commission on the Future of Higher Education. She said the panel would help develop a “comprehensive national strategy for postsecondary education,� exploring such issues as access, affordability, and higher education’s role in reversing America’s declining competitiveness in the world economy.

The rest of this article is different folks view on the whole thing, which basically seems to be “it’s too early to tell/we don’t want any more regulations/it’s never a bad idea to study our practices.”

And third, also on the Inside Higher Ed web site, comes this Q&A with the writers of a new book called Remaking the American University. Among other things, the authors are worried about universities becoming all about “the bottom line” (as in “What worries us most is that universities and colleges have become so preoccupied with succeeding in a world of markets that they too often forget the need to be places of public purpose as well.”), the problems with rankings by outfits like U.S. News and World Report, the problems with doing institutional assessment (“people don’t like assessment if it is done to them”), problems with academic publishing, and about technology in the classroom (“Not until faculty members, for their own reasons and purposes, decide that Web-based instruction offers both important and sustainable advantages will major changes in collegiate teaching actually happen — regardless of how attractive distance education becomes”).

I have a lot of different thoughts about this, but because I have a lot of other things to do right now, I’ll just list them and let you fill in the blanks at your leisure:

  • Few things are less interesting to me than grades.
  • One of these things includes institutional assessment.
  • I am sure that the ancient Greeks also complained about grade inflation at Plato’s Academy. They might have complained about institutional assessment, too.
  • I suspect that this commission to study American universities will not go far because a) “No Child Left Behind” has been a bad policy that is unlikely to be repeated easily, b) American universities pretty much have their act together in terms of assessment and competiting on an international level, and c) if this commission turns into a “political witch hunt,” then I suspect they won’t get as far as they want to get.
  • Of course, I agree that it’s a bad thing for universities to remake themselves in the model of for-profit corporations. On the other hand, if the funding for public universities is going to steadily decrease, then the money to pay the bills has to come from somewhere. And tuition increases alone ain’t going to make up the difference.
  • The only thing that is reassuring about all this is history because academia has more or less been down these paths many times before.

Update:
My colleague Bill Hart-Davidson sent me a link to this article on Economist.com, “The brain business.” It’s an excellent piece that shows the view from “across the pond” and how similar it is to here. Oh, and there is a list of the “top 20 universities in the world,” based on some dubious measures by a university in Japan. Of the 20 schools, one was Japanese, two were British, and 13 were in the U.S.

New Gym Thoughts

Annette and I changed gyms this summer. We had been members of the One On One Athletic Club, which we had joined after we moved here in ’98. For a variety of different reasons I won’t go into now, we decided to move our athletic activities to the Washtenaw County Rec Center. This has been a move that has been interesting in a bunch of different ways:

  • The Washtenaw County Rec Center is significantly cheaper than One On One– SIGNIFICANTLY cheaper, like a third of the amount we were paying in dues.
  • The WCRC has a pool, which Annette likes plenty.
  • The WCRC has plenty of the things that I like to do: the eliptical machines, the bikes, the weight machines, etc. They also have an indoor track that is pretty nice, too.
  • The locker rooms at the WCRC aren’t all that great. This has been more of an issue for Annette than me since I have yet to use the WCRC locker rooms (so far, I do my thing and come home to get cleaned up), though it makes me think that the women’s locker room at One on One were better than the men’s locker rooms.
  • The “Beautiful People” are not members of the WCRC. This is interesting because at One on One, I was certainly one of the more “flabby” and middle-aged members, especially in relation to the kept wives (who, while middle-aged, did nothing but exercise), the students from U of M, and the muscle-head types. In contrast, the WCRC definitely caters to the senior set. It is not at all unusual for me, pushing 40, to be the youngest person in the work-out room, sometimes by 20 years. A lot of folks with walkers and canes, which is good I guess– hey, they need the exercise too, right?– but passing them on the walking track can be kinda tricky.
  • There are no TVs over the treadmills and eliptical machines at the WCRC like there were at One on One. On the down-side, I kinda miss watching the news or whatever while working out. On the up-side, they don’t play any thunka-thunka-thunka music in the place (I think the old people would throw fits), which means I can listen to my own music on my iPod.
  • And I guess in the end, the WCRC is not making me any skinnier any faster than One on One. I don’t know what to make of this yet….

U of M dentists beat me to my podcasting idea (but not really)

The Ann Arbor News ran a story today in the business section (of all places) titled “iPods help drill U-M students dentists: Lecture ‘podcasts’ now available.” Drill students– get it? get it? Ah, that dental humor….

Actually, this isn’t really what I’m trying to attempt with including audio in my online class, at least not exactly. I’m not even completely sure I’m doing what would be called “podcasting” because I haven’t quite figured out that part of the technology out yet, particularly the RSS stuff. I mean, I know that blogger has an audioblogging feature that is stupid easy to use: just record a message with them with a phone. The sound quality isn’t fantastic, but it is passable and I think I can set that up with RSS, but I want to do something more sophisticated than that.

Of course, the concern/worry I have is that if I build some sort of podcast outside of the class shell, I’m not convinced that my students will use it. And furthermore, I don’t know if I really need to build it outside fo the class eCollege software. As I think I mentioned earlier, I can record sound files with my iPod and a Belkin microphone, save these things as mp3s, and then simply upload them to the eCollege site. They aren’t “podcasts” in the purest sense, but hey, who cares? If they help…

… which brings me back ot the dentists. Basically, they are doing some podcasting of lectures at the U of M dental school, and you can even get them through iTunes (no, I’m not going to try to find a link to them….) The dean of the college is behind it– he says in the article that he’s on his fifth iPod.

But the thing that I thought was interesting for my purposes was this:

[Jared Van Ittersum, who was credited with heading the podcasting concept at U-M] said podcasting lectures evolved from a similar effort at the U-M Medical School, which provides low-resolution video of professors’ lectures for students to download from the Web.

But given the prevalence of the music players among students, podcasting emerged as a more mobile medium, said Trek Glowacki, an employee at the dental school’s informatics department and a student at U-M’s School of Information. Glowacki led the pilot study into whether students preferred podcasting to video. He found most picked the pod, which also involved far fewer university staff hours to deliver.

This interests me for a variety of different reasons, but besides the idea that the technology of the podcast is easier and more mobile for students, I think it is also considerably easier and more mobile for instructors as well. I could record and broadcast video of myself with eCollege, but even with the support I would get from Continuing Education at EMU to do this, it would still be an enormous pain in the ass. I mean, I’d have to go to a studio someplace, they’d have to cut the video together (or I’d have to do it, and that’d be a totally different learning curve), it would take a long time for students to download, etc., etc. Making and delievering a 10 minute mp3 file (albeit a not great sounding one) takes me a total of 20 minutes: 10 for the recording and 10 with the futzing. Not counting-retakes, of course.

Go read My Freshman Year right now

I finished reading Rebekah “not her real name” Nathan’s book My Freshman Year: What a Professor Learned by Becoming a Student the other day. I say “not her real name” because the author had originally written the book under a pseudonym about students at AnyU, but it’s been pretty well documented that Nathan is really Cathy Small and AnyU is actually Northern Arizona University.

I think that anyone who teaches college and who ever wonders what the heck these students are thinking should read this book. No, should be required to read this book. About a month ago, there was a discussion on the WPA-L mailing list I posted about here, one where folks were complaining about “the students today” in relation to the Tommy Lee Goes to College show. (BTW, I did actually watch parts of a couple of episodes of the show; I didn’t find the students that surprising or even that “bad” or whatever. I just thought the show was kind of boring). These folks complaining about students need to really really read this book.

I don’t think Nathan’s/Small’s book says anything about the student experience that is too surprising or even that different from (what I remember of) my college experience. But it’s her willingness to really partake in the contemporary student experience that is most striking to me, I think. Nathan/Small has real empathy for her students as she writes this book, and I guess it’s just refreshing to see some educator to be as undertanding of students as we educators would hope students to be of the world around them.

This is not to say that Nathan/Small doesn’t have any critiques of contemporary students. For example, the chapter on international students’ views about the general ignorance of the world outside of the US American students have is pretty effective, and she is critical of the “corporate state” of affairs at most American universities nowadays and how this is driven in part by student demands. But she does a good job of complicating these problems. This book never reads like a “those dumb kids today” critique because Nathan/Small goes to great lengths to examine why students have the perspectives they have, and she points out frequently enough that in many ways, the problems of students today aren’t a whole lot different from the problems of students in her generation or even in the 19th century.

My only problem with the book is its focus on “traditional students:” 18-22 year olds living in the dorms. This isn’t really Nathan’s/Small’s problem exactly because this is what she sets out to do, but it’d be interesting for someone to do an ethnographic study like this of more non-traditional students. Of course, it’d be a heck of a lot more difficult to follow non-trads around for a year….

Ellen Degeneres caused Katrina (apparently)

Well, not really. But in this parody on the Dateline Hollywood web site, which I stumbled across via boing-boing, this is what Pat Robertson said.

You know, when I first read this, I thought “of course he said this,” and apparently a lot of other bloggers thought this was real too. That’s just an indication about how crazy Pat Robertson has gotten.

A long day for the Emus…

I’m sitting here watching Eastern Michigan’s football team getting absolutely humiliated by that quaint liberal arts school in Ann Arbor, the University of Michigan. As I write this sentence right now, it’s still the first quarter (and the proverbial “anything can happen”), but so far, it’s been EMU four ‘n out, and then two scores by U of M. It’s 14-0 right now with over 8 minutes left in the first quarter, and I am quite sure it will be 21-0 by the time I finish this post.

Now, I realize that the University of Michigan has had a good football team for a long long time, and it looks like they have a pretty good one this year (though, as their loss to Notre Dame last week demonstrated, not as good as a lot of folks in Ann Arbor think). And I also realize that EMU has some very strong sports teams in things other than football– women’s basketball (men’s once in a while, too), swimming, and track and field to name a few. Actually, the track team at EMU is quite good.

But football– not so much. They’ve had a terrible team for a number of years now. By the way, it’s 21-0 now.

This is not normally the sort of thing I would cover in a post on my official blog, nor is it something I would really care about one way or the other. I mean, I’m not much of a football fan in general, but I’ll watch college games on TV, I went to see the Iowa-Michigan game last year, and it’s kinda fun to go see an EMU home football game once in a while. But I guess a game like this makes me wonder why EMU has a football team– or at least a NCAA Division I football team.

Now it’s 28-0.

Last year, there was a controversy about attendance at football games that forced the resignation of the former athletic director. The student newspaper, The Eastern Echo, reported the story here. In brief: it turns out that the NCAA has a rule that says in order to be a Division I football team, a school has to have an average game attendance of 15,000. EMU said that the average attendance at home games was 16,060. Anyone who has ever been to an EMU homegame would probably wonder about those numbers, and it turns out with good reason. According to The Echo (who had to invoke the Freedom of Information Act to do this report), the total number of tickets issued and sold for home games last year was 22,258. Even my meager math skills tell me that with these numbers, the average attendance per game was quite a bit lower than 16,060.

I have no idea what the NCAA’s reaction to this is; perhaps we are on some sort of probation.

35-0 now.

The other thing is that the new president at EMU, John Fallon, has made it one of the goals of the institution to “Strengthen the University’s Athletic Programs,” and it’s no secret that for the board of regents, this means in part making sure that EMU stays in Division I football. I think it probably means that for Fallon, too.

The thing that’s sad about this though is that, given all the demands on limited resources and the real inability of for EMU to compete at this level, the logical and smart thing to do would be for EMU to drop down to the next division– I guess it’s IAA or II, I’m not sure which. If we did that, we’d save a ton of money (because I guarantee you that the football team is not a self-sustaining program here) and we’d probably even be competitive.

At the half, it’s 38-0. I think I’ll turn the channel.

Update:
First off, the final score was 55-0.

Second, the Ann Arbor News had a story on the front page this past Sunday titled “EMU looks to boost its football program– and fading fan base,” and that story pretty much explored the same questions I did about playing football in Division I. And the quote from EMU president John Fallon is pretty much what I expected:

Some campus critics ask that given such challenges, why stay in the NCAA’s Division I? Why not pull away from big-time sports?

“I don’t think we should,” Fallon says, noting schools such as Northwestern have revived struggling football programs. “I’m not the kind of person that would want to give up running with the big dogs.”

I like Fallon so far, I really do, but this is the kind of “folksy wisdom” that really glosses over the issue. And actually, the “issue” is commented on earlier in the article:

Winning aside, Fallon and other EMU officials and students acknowledge the university faces some special challenges in drawing fans to major sports events.

For one thing, fewer students live on campus than on most Division I schools. Last fall, about 3,500 students lived on campus and another 3,100 lived in Ypsilanti, about only 28 percent of EMU’s total enrollment of nearly 24,000, according to university figures.

In addition, the university has a large number of non-traditional students who already have a family or a job. “They can’t shoe-horn in more conventional college experiences like a college basketball or football game,” Fallon says.

Look, besides having a tradition of winning, the vast majority of students at that liberal arts school in Ann Arbor are “traditional” in that they live on or near campus, they are 18-22 years old, and they have the time and money to be a fan. A huge percentage of our students– typically not 18-22 and not on campus– are working on Saturdays so they can actually attend college in the first place. They don’t have the luxury of being fans, and there’s little reason to believe that’s going to change anytime soon.

(A slightly belated) welcome to the CCC Online

I meant to post about this earlier in the week, but better late than never: welcome to town, the new CCC Online! I certainly think it’s the right idea and direction for the CCCCs. My copy of the paper version of the journal arrived yesterday (quite a bit fatter than usual too, in part because of the inclusion of Forum, which is a newsletters for non-tenure-track teachers and faculty in composition), and I guess it makes me wonder when College Composition and Communication (the paper journal) and the CCC Online will become one entity.

This might be kind of naive or it might be kind of obvious, but it just seems inevitable to me that academic journals like the CCCs will eventually not be published on paper anymore. I don’t mean this as some pronouncement of the “end of print,” nor do I think that the codex is going to vanish anytime soon. Books are just too convenient of a technology, especially for things like trade books and novels and such. I do think academic book publishers– especially the smaller ones –would be wise to investigate various “print on demand” technologies that make it cost effective to publish a single book, which would thus allow these presses to take on projects that are intellectually important but “impractical” from a sales and marketing point of view. Though this is a slightly different rant.

But I think academic journals are different. I don’t know if I am a typical reader of academic journals or not, but I subscribe to only one (the CCCs) and I do not read that journal all the way through (though, as part of my “new school year resolutions,” I intend to take the time to actually read some of the current scholarship in my field). I am more likely to browse online journals like Kairos, but the way that I usually engage with academic journals is through my research with various electronic search tools– the MLA Bibliography, WilsonSelect, etc. With this research, I do not go and look to read a journal per se; I look to read the article in that journal. Furthermore, if I can find that article electronically (and if it’s a PDF, even better!), then I probably wouldn’t even touch the actual periodical.

So, assuming my way of using periodicals is not too far off from the norm, why not just publish these things electronically? The advantages to web-based academic journals just seem so obvious to me that I don’t understand why paper periodicals haven’t gone to the web. I mean, electronic journals would save a lot of money (because you eliminate the costs of printing, mailing, and storing the paper), they are a lot more flexible (want to include color images with your essay? sound? video? etc.? go ahead!), potentially more interactive (which is what the CCC Online is after, I think), and a lot more accessible.

Without the restraints of print, journals could also eliminate things like maximum page lengths, they wouldn’t need to think in terms of volumes and issue numbers, and they could be a lot more nimble when it comes to bringing things out to readers (though in my experience with electronic journals, both as a writer and as a reviewer of articles, just because they can publish stuff more quickly doesn’t mean they will).

So it just seems to me that merging of College Composition and Communication (the paper publication) and of the CCC Online (the web site) is kind of inevitable. What will be interesting to see how and when we get to that place.