In an effort to catch up on blog reading and procrastinate from the things I ought to really be doing, I offer this long list of useful (to me) links to readings/entries from blogs in my RSS feed published in the last week or so:
- Via Rebecca “Schenectady Synecdoche” Howard comes news about Sparks Notes available via iTunes. I haven’t listened to it yet, but I downloaded the freebie, which are notes on The Heart of Darkness. For those just too lazy to even read the cheat-sheet notes….
- Derek “Earth Wide Moth” Mueller has a map of composition studies as a field. Kinda interesting.
- On Karios News, Tom Wright has a post about the dumbness of fy comp textbooks (and textbook publishers). Given my latest misadventures with my failed textbook project, I can very much relate.
- “The iPod Took My Seat” from the Los Angeles Times. It’s an article about how when the professor puts the class materials up on the ‘net in the form of a podcast (or video or notes or what-have-you), students skip the class. I guess the two reactions I have are “duh” and wasn’t this a bit in the 80’s movie Real Genius?
- Arizona State U.’s president starts a podcast….
- From Will Richardson comes this post and this post about Orange County (California, that is) schools shutting down blogspot and MySpace activities for the 1.5 million students in the district.
- Blogtalk Reloaded, which would be a cool conference but it is is Vienna, Austria, which is probably a tad out of my travel budget range this year.
- “From Blogger to Published Author, for $30 and up,” a New York Times article about a service called Blurb which will basically take electronic content (they’re talking about blogs here, but it could be anything, I think) and make it into a book. The angle on the article here is “vanity publishing,” but why haven’t academic publishers gone to this “on demand” model of printing? Or rather when will they do this?
- Inside Higher Ed (from back in December, actually), “What You Do All Day,” an article about a study on how college professors spend their time. The two things that ring most true to me are that time spent “teaching” is actually a lot lower than most “lay people” might think (actually, it is a lot less than I thought it was going to be when I first went into this business), and the amount of “administrative” work is increasing.
I think that’s it– heck, isn’t that enough?