Month: April 2006

The confusing meanings of "tagging" Air Force One

Over the weekend, I stumbled across the “Still Free” web site, which is a publicity stunt/public advocacy page by the hip-hop/youth fashion company Ecko. The “Still Free” site features a shaky video of Air Force One outside of an airport hanger and hooded people climbing over a barbed-wire fence to get to it. Ultimately, one of these “vandals” spray paints the phrase “Still Free” on the side of the engine of the plane.

Also on the “Still Free” site ia a video of Marc Ecko himself titled “Why I Tagged Air Force One.” It’s kind of a convoluted explaination. He says he did this because the president needs to remember that when he goes places, he needs to represent freedom, and Ecko thought that spray painting the plane would be a great way to open a dialog. Then he goes on about graffiti as an art form and some of the kind of stupid laws that prevent kids under 18 from buying broad-tipped permanent markers in New York City and such. But then he says that vandalism is never right and he’s not suggesting that people go out and do that. Ecko just wants people to chill and talk about freedom.

Ah, okay. A bold (and crazy and illegal) move for freedom, I guess.

But it turns out (and actually, I knew this all along because this is how I found out about the “Still Free” web site in the first place) that this was all an elaborate hoax. As this AP wire story reports, the video appeared real enough that an Air Force spokesman for the unit responsible for Air Force One was “looking into it.” But of course it wasn’t real.

Why did he do it?

“I wanted to do something culturally significant, wanted to create a real pop-culture moment,” said Marc Ecko of Marc Ecko Enterprises. “It’s this completely irreverent, over-the-top thing that could really never happen: this five-dollar can of paint putting a pimple on this Goliath.”

Okay… so, tell us Marc; how did you pull it off?

Ecko acknowledged Friday that his company had rented a 747 cargo jet at San Bernardino’s airport and covertly painted one side to look like Air Force One. Employees signed secrecy agreements and worked inside a giant hangar until the night the video was made. Ecko declined to say how much the stunt cost.

“It’s not cheap,” he said. “You have to be rich.”

So ultimately, this statement about free speech– which appears to come in a form (vandalism) which Ecko says is of course illegal and wrong– is actually a fabrication, a fiction, and something that could never happen. Which, in a very real way, is not an example of free speech at all. And for me it is all the more problematic because it portrays itself as a “real” event in the name of “free speech.” It’s sort of like these faith healers you see getting people to get out of wheelchairs: at first, it demonstrates the powers of the healer; but it then it soon demonstrates the powers of the con man.

Or I guess it’s a lot like the whole Million Little Pieces thing.

That last sentence from Ecko in the wire story, “You have to be rich,” is of course key. It suggests two very important things of this speech act. First, it isn’t “free;” in fact, it’s really REALLY expensive. Second, it isn’t a protest at all, but rather a commercial. In the end, this is simply an advertisement for Marc Ecko Enterprises, which I suppose is a form of free speech, but its purpose is not really to raise awareness so much as it is to sell sweatshrits.

Anyway, I’m perhaps giving this more attention than it deserves, but go check out the video and see what I mean.

Bush Impeachment– this might not be as crazy as you might think…

I don’t have too much time right now to comment on this too extensively, but I managed to stumble across this, “Bush Impeachment – The Illinois State Legislature is Preparing to Drop a Bombshell.” Basically, the article claims (by using a weird loophole in the procedures for the US House) that there is going to be a resolution calling for Bush’s impeachment.

Now, I don’t know if this is true or not. But of course sitting in my desk right now is a copy of the March 2006 Harper’s magazine, which has the cover story “The Case for Impeachment: Why We Can No Longer Afford George W. Bush.” And here’s an interesting quote from this article I linked to above:

The call for impeachment is starting to grow well beyond what could be considered a fringe movement. An ABC News/Washington Post Poll Conducted April 6-9 showed that 33% of Americans currently support Impeaching President Bush, coincidentally, only a similar amount supported impeaching Nixon at the start of the Watergate investigation.

Crowley Carnival, The Wealth of Networks

These comp/rhet reading carnival things always seem to crop up at the worst time for me. For example, at least Jenny, Jeff, and Debbie Hawhee are into reading Sharon Crowley’s latest book, Towards a Civil Discourse: Rhetoric and Fundamentalism. And of course, they pick now, the end of the term, tons of grading and other last minute projects, to attend to. Sheesh. Well, judging from what they are saying here, it looks like it will be something worth looking at later.

Speaking of which: the other day I stumbled across the wiki for Yochai Benkler’s book, The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom. This might be something I look through before the Crowley book, to tell the truth. For starters, the whole thing is available as a PDF on the wiki page for the book. But beyond the whole “ease of access” issue, Benkler’s book (as Will Richardson has blogged) was characterized by Lawrence Lessig as “by far the most important and powerful book written in the fields that matter most to me in the last ten years.â€� Pretty darn high praise indeed….

Let the contract negotiations begin! (And cheers to the EMU-AAUP's stand on Continuing Ed)

There’s been an exchange of all-campus emails lately between the administration, faculty council, and the union. Long-story short: the faculty and the union are not happy with the way that the interim provost (who everyone likes, by the way) was made into a permanent provost, and the administration and the union are beginning to build their cases for contract negotiations. What case is that? Basically, the administration is saying a) we have no money, and b) we have plenty of faculty; predictably, the union is saying “do not!” to both of these things.

Ah yes, contract negotiation season….

My guess is that EMU really doesn’t have as much money to work with as the union wants to claim, but there’s no getting around the argument about the number of faculty. Simply put, EMU has fewer faculty now than it did 10 years ago, and the number of administrators on campus has risen in almost direct proportion to the losses in faculty. Even an English professor can do that math; all I’ve got to do is look around the halls and see the rising number of part-timers and of suits.

But my sense is that the biggest issues in this coming contract are going to be money (that’s always an issue) and health care. I don’t know enough to know how either of these things are going to play out, but there is plenty of opportunity for drama over the summer. This is simply speculation on my part, but I think that if the administration tries to offer the faculty a contract where we have to pay such a significant portion of our medical insurance out of pocket that we end up taking a pay cut (and, in the nutshell, this is the contract that the lecturers signed last year), then we will certainly strike. But I also think (again, just speculation) that both the union and the administration know this, so I think (hope, really) we will avoid this.

Of course, this faculty versus administration posturing will get much more hot ‘n heavy in August, which is when I (happily) will be out of the country.

Anyway, while I have my issues with the negotiating process and some of the positions both the union and the administration take on some of these matters, a big “thumbs up” to the EMU-AAUP and its president Howard Bunsis for his recent presentation before the Board of Regents on Continuing Education (warning– this is a PowerPoint presentation turned into a PDF).

Continuing Education at EMU exists in this sort of “in-between world,” more or less outside of the faculty contract for reasons I don’t entirely understand. Anyway, CE is charged with all instruction that takes place in non-traditional settings– weekends, off-campus, online, etc.– and, largely because of online classes, it’s been making money hand over fist. And they are really making money because CE teaches almost all of its classes with non-tenure-track faculty or tenure-track faculty teaching some sort of overload for extra money.

In the interest of full disclosure here: I’ve been working with CE more closely since I started teaching online in Fall 2005, and I have been quite happy with the sort of support I’ve gotten from them. This term, I’m teaching an online class as an overload for reasons that are complicated and only partly about extra money. (And for what it’s worth, I don’t think I’ll ever teach an overload like this again.) In Fall 2005, I taught online “in load”– that is, part of my regular teaching. This spring and summer, I’m also teaching online (again, through CE) and I guess it’s “extra,” but all spring and summer teaching at EMU is something faculty do voluntarily for extra money. It’s also worth mentioning– and you’ll see why in a moment– that I don’t take overloads into my online class, mostly for ethical reasons but also because teaching an advanced writing course online with more than 20 students would be way WAY too much work.

Part of what Howard is talking about in this presentation isn’t (IMO) that big of a deal, at least to me. For example, departments do have control over what courses can be offered through CE– at least in theory– right now. But there is one recommendation that the EMU-AAUP is making that is enormously significant: the elimination of the “grading stipend.”

Basically, if there are more than 25 students in a CE course, the instructor is paid $150 per student. So let’s say you’re teaching an online course and, instead of capping the course at 20 or 25 (my online course is capped at 20), you let in a total of 50 students. If you did that, then you would make $3750 above and beyond the pay for the course. Or let’s say you let in a total of 100 students; that’s 75 X 150, or $11,250.

The administration is happy about this situation because it allows them to maximize the student to instructor ratio. The instructors who engage in this process are happy about this because they make a lot of money. And obviously, this practice is a disservice to students. I suppose it depends on the particular course, and I think there is some truth to the argument that some of my colleagues make who engage in this practice: if we’re going to teach lecture hall classes of 200+ students, then there shouldn’t be anything wrong with teaching online classes with 50 or 75 or 100 students. But, as my momma taught me, two wrongs don’t make a right.

I think the majority of faculty at EMU would support a change where faculty get paid more than they do currently to teach overload courses through CE and the elimination of the grading stipend, which is what the union is proposing. But there will be a vocal minority of faculty (the ones who are making the money, of course) who will oppose this, and I think it’s hard to say what the administration is going to say. So it will be interesting to see how this plays out.

Resaurant Review: Grizzly Peak Brewing Company

What and Where:

Grizzly Peak Brewing Company | 120 W Washington Street | Ann Arbor, MI 48104 (734) 741-7325

Ratings (1=terrible, 5=mind-blowingly great)

  • Tastiness: 3.5
  • Service: 3.5
  • Price (1=super cheap, 5=super expensive): 3.5
  • Value: 3.5
  • General vibe: 4

    • Comments (as of 4/20/06)

    • It’s been a while since I’ve posted a restaurant review here, largely because of my latest adventures in dieting. Well, we decided to take some dieting liberties on Wednesday night and accompany Steve B. and his wife Michelle out for an impromtu dinner. It was quasi-diet friendly… not counting the beer… or, for me, the mashed potatoes…. And to make matters worse, I’m taking a “diet break” this afternoon and evening too. Oh well; back on the wagon on Saturday.
    • There are actually a couple of other brew-pubs in Ann Arbor, but Grizzly Peak is the one we always go to. Perhaps we should give the others a chance (though I have eaten at the Ann Arbor Brewing Company before– I wasn’t impressed). Well, ideas for future reviews….
    • As my numbers might suggest, Grizzly Peak is consistent and consistently good. I can’t recall a bad meal I’ve had there, to tell the truth. Some of my favorites include the ribs, the fish n’ chips, the steaks, the burgers, and the pizzas. Trying for something a bit more “diet friendly,” I went for a chicken dish that included some mashed potatoes, which means I probably would ahve been better off with a steak or something.
    • Prices vary quite a bit here– $6 or $7 for a sandwich (they have a great lunch deal for around that price that includes half a sandwich and a cup of their very good beer and cheddar cheese soup), $20 for the whole steak thing.
    • We hadn’t been in a while because they took Annette’s favorite dish, a vegetarian burger, off the menu. They still have a salad she likes plenty. Which reminds me that I probably should have taken that approach the other night because they have a number of dinner salad kinds of meals.
    • And of course there is the beer, which I find to be pretty good though not great. I personally tend toward the steelhead red. Steve B. enjoyed the porter. I’ve come in before and gotten the “sampler,” which is a pretty good deal if you are feeling in decisive and/or in the mood to drink a fair amount of beer.
    • It’s a very “family friendly” kind of place, though I don’t think was too crazy about the hamburger he ordered this past time. Too much bun.

    YackPack– something else I'll have to talk about in this podcasting article, I suppose…

    See Yackpack, which (as far as I can tell after monkeying around with it for about three minutes) is a website/software that facilitates group podcasts. It looks quite easy and kind of fun. And it looks relevant to what I’m trying to write about, which is an expansion/revision of my CCCCs presentation on podcasting.

    Of course, the tricky things about trying to incorporate this stuff into my online class this coming spring is I don’t have a lot of time to get it up and running. Classes this term end May 1 and classes in the spring term start May 8, which, given the rest of my life, is not a lot of time to do a lot of major revisions to the way I teach online. But it still might be worth a try.

    Yet another handwriting story

    This one, which I stumbled across from a google news search, comes from the ABC News channel in Chicago: “Should students be concerned with proper handwriting?” The answer, according to these folks, is yes.

    A couple of interesting quotes here:

    Some educators link the demise of penmanship to the rejection of repetitive drills as a teaching tool. Also, teachers are spending less time on handwriting and more time covering subjects like reading and math, which are measured by standardized tests.

    Huh? So, we should have a return to reptitive drills? And by the way, my third grade son seems to still be doing some version of reptitive drills with handwriting.

    They talk about the problems of the handwritten portion of the SAT and the fact that many finals still need to be done by hand, etc. I wonder how long that’s going to be the case, though– I’d be surprised if my son will have to do a writing test for the SAT by hand, for example.

    And then there’s this:

    While teachers who grade the SAT are told not to mark off for sloppy penmanship, research shows that handwriting can send a message.

    “It’s hard when you look at some types of handwriting, to not read certain things into it,” says Dana Huff, an English teacher at the Weber School – who also grades essays for the SAT. “You know the big, bubbly handwriting, for instance, can sometimes lead a teacher to think, ‘Oh, Airhead.'”

    “If your handwriting is barely legible, it makes them think that you are not really an organized person,” says 17-year-old Adam Levinson, “that you are writing too fast, and you are not thinking about it.”

    Which, again, is why I type everything but a grocery list.

    They come in waves/the end is near…

    I can’t remember the last time I have felt this swamped with grading/commenting on student work. I’m teaching an overload this term, and while it is a modest overload (one class that I’ve taught many times before and which I kind of feel like I need to teach in order to further a research project), it has really slowed me down the last couple of weeks.

    This week is the final wave for everything in my classes. The last day of classes are this coming Monday, and as a result, I’ve got (between my three classes) five sets of projects/essays to comment on. Then, after I finish that reading/commenting, there’s another big wave. Final grades need to be calculated in two of my classes by Monday of next week (students in those classes use finals week to revise things if they want to). And then in my graduate class, another wave will begin as they hand in their seminar projects.

    And I’ve been distracted by getting writing.emich.edu to work.

    And the weather is really starting to turn nice.

    And then the spring term starts in two and a half weeks, though I’m kind of looking forward to that. Since most “school business” more or less shuts down during the spring and summer terms (May to August, basically), I will be mostly just teaching, and the course I’ll be teaching will be online. I’ll certainly have to meet with some MA students for advising and such, but the service burden drops off quite a bit after the regular term.

    Anyway, the end is near, and I think.