Month: April 2006

South Beach Diet, Week 1: I don’t care if it’s just water weight!

So, how’s the diet going, you ask? Not bad. In the first week, I have lost about five or six pounds, depending on how I stand on the scale. I thought I had lost more than that, but that’s really my inability to do math.

I felt like I was pretty good as far as sticking to the diet goes this week– I’d give myself about a B or a B+. Annette and I did drink on Saturday night (hey, it’d been a long week), but otherwise, I wad pretty dedicated to the “phase 1” concept of the diet, which essentially amounts to a diet of low-fat meats, cheese, lots of vegetables, and no alcohol. Thus my B or B+. By the way, if you’re wondering about the “healthiness” of the SB diet, look at it like this: basically, you don’t eat starches and/or baked goods. It’s like a wheat-free vegan diet, except with meat.

My weight loss for the first week is pretty typical for the first part of SB, which, like most diets like this, give you a sort of “quick start” at the beginning. When I mentioned my weight loss this last week to my mother on the phone, she said “Oh, that’s just water weight.” And she’s probably right. But you know what? I don’t care. Five pounds is five pounds, and it’s nice to have that kind of start.

I don’t anticipate losing this much this week, but I’ll keep plugging away. And as I get caught up on my mountain of school work and as the term draws to a close, I’ll be able to get back to the gym, too.

HigherEd BlogCon: check it out….

I’ve been too busy with end of the (school) year business to really pay much attention to the blog-o-sphere lately, but check out the HigherEd BlogCon going on right now. I’m not completely sure who the sponsors of this thing are (I recognize a publisher’s name on the list), and I’m not sure these folks are necessarily in my “branch” of higher education. But it looks like there are just a gazillion different resources here. And I like the concept of the web-based conference/blog-based “carnival” of texts.

I’ll have to go back to this when I get finished shoveling through some more immediate paperwork and grading and such.

Playing with my new digital camera

Sophie on bed

I bought a digital camera yesterday, an Olympus FE-130. I was in the market for a $200 or less camera, and I got this one at Costco for about $175, which is about $30-40 less than I had seen similar cameras. Here’s a picture of Sophie, pretty much the only one around here who would let me take a picture of them.

It’s certainly not a fancy-pants camera, but it’s small, it takes some nice snapshot-style pictures, and it even can take short and somewhat low-quality movies. Here’s one I took this morning of an increasingly reluctant Sophie— it’s funny, it’s a MOV file, and it’s abut 8 MB.

This thing didn’t come with a memory card, and I will probably buy one because otherwise, I will have to work with the 25 MB harddrive built into tht camera itself. But I might not buy one because I also stopped by the Apple store yesterday and bought a do-hickey that can connect my camera to my iPod Photo and download the images. Apple’s web site that describes which cameras work with this device is a little fuzzy, so I took my iPod into Costco and persuaded a guy in the store to see if the camera I wanted to buy would work with it. (Though as far as I can tell, this thing would probably work with any camera that connects to a computer with a USB cable, which is pretty much any digital camera). So we plugged the store’s display camera into my iPod and bingo, it worked. The Costco’s comment was “wow, that’s pretty slick.”

The goal here is to be able to take the camera and the iPod on our upcoming European vacation and to be able to manage pictures without a laptop. We’ll see how it works.

Welcome to the blogosphere, Linda AK!

My EMU colleague Linda Adler-Kassner has started a blog called browndogsblog. It’s a modest effort so far, but give her some encouragement! Go over there and post! Right now!

All of this reminds me that I need to do some updating/housecleaning around here. Once I get through the mountain of stuff at the end of the term, which is already creeping up, I think I’ll be ready to pay more attention here. But probably not before.

Online secondary school in Michigan; African-Americans and Internet access

It’s the mad mad MAD dash at the end of the semester (note to self: next time you’re going to be out of town for two weekends in a row and you’re trying to put together a couple of presentations for said out of town trips, AND you need to then turn one of said presentations into some kind of longer piece, make sure you plan ahead), and I’m not sure I’m going to make it. Though given that it is one way or the other soon just going to “end,” I suppose I will.

Anyway, two articles of note here via the NCTE Inbox:

First, there’s this, “Online courses aren’t just for homeschoolers anymore,” which is in The Christian Science Monitor. Talk about learning something new every day– see these three opening paragraphs:

If high school student Kelsey Speaks had taken all of her classes at her bricks-and-mortar school, she wouldn’t now be three years into her Latin studies. Since junior high, Kelsey has enrolled in eight courses in a virtual classroom through Colorado Online Learning, a state-funded program. The junior at tiny La Veta High School in southern Colorado says taking courses online is a great choice. “It’s allowed me to do things I wouldn’t otherwise have been able to do,” she says.

In addition to letting her take courses (for free) that her school doesn’t offer, online learning has made her schedule flexible enough that she can captain the debate team, edit the yearbook, and do volunteer work as well. She also gets to study independently, which she enjoys.

Once considered the domain of home-schooled students, K-12 online learning is a fast-growing option for public school students in rural, urban, and suburban areas. Michigan lawmakers are likely to pass legislation soon that will require high school students to take one course online before they graduate.

The second article is “Digital Divide Closing as Blacks Turn to Internet” and in the New York Times. For the most part, it does exactly what the headline suggests: it reports on the closing of the gap between different groups (particularly African-Americans, but other minorities too) as it relates to Internet access, which I have certainly seen in my own teaching. But it also reports that this “closing of the gap” is somewhat debatable, which I have also seen in my own teaching.

Back on the South Beach Diet

What’s that bit about April being the cruelest month? Well, I have decided to make it even crueler decided it was time for a diet. Actually, it wasn’t literary masochism that drove me back to dieting, but the excesses of back-to-back work road-trips, my birthday week, beer making, traveling to Florida to see the in-laws, and general stress eating because of crazy school stuff.

I’ve been feelin’ mighty tubby.

And I’ve been feeling way out of shape, too. In the fall, I was able to go to the gym between four and five days a week. Since January, I’m not sure I’ve been to the gym four or five times.

So, as a result of my general tubbiness and out-of-shapeness, I’m back on “the program;” specifically, the South Beach Diet. As loyal readers may recall, I have attempted any number of “non-diet diets” recently where I just tried to “eat right,” etc. This has not worked. The South Beach Diet is the only thing that has even kind of worked for me in the past– I lost around 15 or 20 pounds before we went to Hawaii– so I’m giving it another whirl.

My goal is to lose as much as I can by August. I’d like to lose about 30 pounds, but that’s probably wishful thinking.

How’s it going after two days? Well, right now, I’m hungry….

Jacobson Symposium 2006: Thoughts on what others said

I had a fantastic time Saturday at the Jacobson Symposium. I’ll post some info about what I said tomorrow or so, but I thought the other presenters were excellent and I feel like I came away with a lot of good ideas. I guess it just goes to show that they’re doing some great stuff with technology here at Creighton.

So, here’s a run-down of my notes, my impressions, and my miscellaneous observations:

  • I ended up sitting at a table with long-time computers and writing familiar face Joan Latchaw from the University of Nebraska, Omaha. I think we had met before, but it was nice putting a face with a name. And a big howdy to the other folks from UNO, too.
  • Creighton President Father John Schelegel gave some opening remarks that I thought were pretty interesting. Schelegel said that Creighton was the “Silicon Valley of the Jesuit order,” which appeared to me to be the case based on my short visit.
  • The first group of presentations included talks by Eileen Dugan about cool uses of audio files/podcasts for her History lectures; Rob Dornsife, an English professor who generated a lot of talk and thinking about the “cult-like” status of things like handwriting; and Joel Davies, a professor in Journalism and Mass Communication who talked about graphic design stuff. Two things that Joel said I thought were worth noting: first, he talked about the frustration he has with the amount of time it takes to get students “up to speed” with the design software and hardware and how that takes away from talking about other design issues (I can relate). Second, and this goes out to my EMU colleagues, all of the journalism students have to take web design.
  • The next session featured Tobias Nownes, an Instructional Designer at Creighton, talking about some of the more nuts ‘n bolts stuff with blogging software and such. He had a pretty cool little web-based tool for converting PowerPoint presentations into web sites; I thought I had the link written down, but maybe not.

    After him, there was a presentation by Bridget Keegan and Matthew Low about using a blog in an introductory literary theory class. They have a web site up with much of their presentation notes on it. Again, a great talk, one where I think they do a good job of modeling some of the “best practices” in class blogs, including a lot of the common concerns and problems: flaming, FREPA issues and privacy, resistance to technology, etc., etc. Two things that I wrote down: I really like the way that they had students in this literature class work at coming up with the “best practices” for what a good blog post should look like, and I thought the list of attributes that they had at the end of the semester was interesting too. To me, it looked like a lot the initial group of practices focused on mechanics; later in the term, the practices seemed more about “good writing.” The second thing is that I think that Bridget captured one of the major problems of blogs in teaching: it’s supposed to be a “fun” activity, and she thought that her students were resistant to doing something that was supposed to be kind of fun in a class.

    Last but not least here was a presentation by Gintaras Duda, who is a physics professor at Creighton. He gave a great talk about his experiences in using blogs to teach an introductory physics class. One of the things that Gintaras said was, according to past surveys at other institutions, students leave intro to physics courses with even worse attitudes about the class than before it began. So, in an effort to combat these “bad attitudes,” Gintaras set up a blog where he posted things in an effort to connect physics to the “real” world and invited his students to post to it. The incentive for students was the blog space was extra credit, which, in the context of this particular class (and also if you think about blogging as one of those things that ought to be kind of “fun” or at least voluntary) made a lot of sense.

    Also– I guess maybe because of he is a scientist, after all– Gintaras talked about some of the statistical work he did comparing student attitudes about physics in his classes, where there were blogs, with sections of physics where students didn’t have blogs. In the classes with the blogs, students had better overall attitudes. Sure, no doubt that there are a lot of other factors here, but I for one really appreciate the fact that he’s making the effort to demonstrate some sort of statistical evidence for the value of blogs.

Like I said, really great stuff.

Of course, it’s taken me a couple days (off and on) to write this up since it’s been a pretty crazy getting back into the swing of things. And before I know it, it’ll all be over for the semester, too….