Month: June 2006

"Datamining" with Google advice

Here are a couple of sites I will want to come back to later when putting together some various syllabi: “Google Guide: Using Search Operators” and this entry from a blog called CyberWyre, “Data Mining on the Internet with Google.” They both outline a lot of special search operators that you can use with Google that I had certainly not heard of before.

BTW, I came across this site via the del.icio.us/popular page, which has become a part of my morning coffee reading. It took me a while to figure out the point of a service like del.icio.us, but now I’m all for it. I think I need to start playing around with this digg thing next…

Buzz-kill

I went to an informal workshop/discussion this afternoon held by some folks in Continuing Education about audio files, podcasting, and some other multimedia technologies for teaching, mostly for teaching online. Mostly, a good time was had by one and all– mostly. I think the tech support guys for CE did a good job, and, while I was very much non-prepared and experienced some technical problems (which, on the plus side, gave me a chance to mock Windoze), I think at least some people got something out of what I said. So it was mostly good.

But not completely. Thus the title of my post.

Here are what I saw as the problems:

  • Podcast frenzy! Podcast frenzy! Not all but many of the faculty at this event were there because they had heard of this thing called Podcasting and, based on the buzz, they figured they had better get on the band-wagon and get on right now. But it seemed pretty clear to me that many of these folks– again, not all, but many– really did not know what they would do with a Podcast or if they would ever Podcast or, really, at the end of the day, what a “Podcast” was. I didn’t ask, but it might have been interesting to ask how many of the attendees had actually heard a podcast.
  • Tangent-Land. Somewhere along the line, someone brought up one of those issues, maybe the issue, that always comes up at sessions that involve teaching with technology: what about copyright, what about fair-use? For me, the main reason why these issues are always so frustrating are because no one— certainly no one has not made IP and copyright their full-time business– knows the answer. Furthermore, no one– certainly no one in academia– wants to admit that they don’t know the answer. So what ends up happening is people talk about things they may (or may not) know about IP and copyright, at least until someone says something like “we can’t solve that now, so let’s just move on.” Ultimately, I think this fear of the rules and not knowing them and being afraid of some unknown consequences are enough to chill innovation. But that’s kind of a tangent in itself, so let’s move on.
  • We can’t do that, real and fake. Okay, there is a lot of things we really can’t do with online classes and with things like podcasting. We can’t assume that all of the students have a high-speed internet access (though most of them do). We can’t assume students have this or that kind of computer, which is also probably true. But then there’s the fake can’t due. For example, it became clear after a while that there were any number of things that were just a lot easier to do with a Mac. So someone asked at one point “So, does that mean we can’t do this stuff if we don’t have a Mac?” (And, of course, my answer is why don’t you have a Mac already?)

    The most troublesome “we (or really, you) can’t do that” of the afternoon for me is I was told that it was “against the rules” for me to use a non-EMU server space to host teaching materials, as in any of the pages available here. The conversations I had after this event with various folks suggests this is just wrong, but again, it’s another example of a knee-jerk “we can’t do that” for no good reason sort of rule. Sounds like an administrator to me….

MySpace losing the "cool" factor

See this article from the June 3 NYT, “MySpace No Longer Their Space?” Basically, the article reports that, while MySpace is still enormously popular, its use has fallen off since April. Blamed in the article are the fact that MySpace is “going corporate” (Ruppert Murdoch bought it a while back) and is thus no longer a “cool” activity for teens; users are realizing that it might not be a good idea in the long-term to post drunk pictures of themselves; and users are starting to realize that it’s annoying to browse web sites that blare bad music at you and that are cluttered with eyeball-numbing graphics. (I’m paraphrasing here).

This Week at the Movies

I don’t normally write movie review-type posts, but we had the experience of seeing the X-Men: The Last Stand in the theater and The Squid and The Whale at home the other night. Here are some thoughts, complete with spoilers, so if you don’t want to be, ah, spoiled, quit reading.

First, an extra credit question: name the Academy Award winning actress who is in both movies (see the end for the answer).

Okay, first the biggie, the X-Men movie:

  • This was a “family movie night” since we had rented the first two earlier in the winter and they seemed to go over well. I think this third one was perhaps a little more intense than the other two, but Will seems to have survived.
  • On the plus side: the effects are cool, shit blows up real good, it’s damn loud, etc. In other words, it’s certainly a big theater movie, which is perhaps why the box office has been so big. But I was once again reminded of just how unpleasant it can be to go see a movie like this in the theater. The place was packed and so, of course, sitting behind us was a family of idiots narrating the film to each other. It wasn’t so bad during the loud parts, but the quiet parts could have been a bit more, well, quiet. Anyway, if I were to do it over, I would have seen this at about 11 am on a Tuesday instead.
  • I’m sorry, but I could never get over the fact that Kelsey “Fraiser Crane” Grammer is in this one. Fraiser I mean Grammer plays Dr. Hank McCoy (what does this say about mutants and/or the likes of me that about half of the mutants are doctors or professors?) who is the U.S. Secretary of Mutant Affairs (or some dumb title) and whose mutation is that he looks like a big blue gorilla— though, I will grant you, he does turn out to be a bad-ass fighter. The voice is bad enough; what makes matters worse is that Fraiser –oops, I mean Hank– spends much of the movie wearing a suit and tie and even reading glasses. So basically, Grammer’s portrayal here is exactly like a big hairy blue Fraiser. I half expected to see David Hyde Pierce make a screen appearance as a mutant who looks like a yellow turtle or something.
  • There are more mixed metaphors here than an eskimo fire fighter watching a rattlesnake convention in St. Peter’s Basilica. You’ve got the whole mutant=terrorist kind of thing, the idea of viruses, diseases/disabilities that aren’t really diseases/disabilities, etc., etc., etc. Best not to think about these things too much and just enjoy shit blowing up and Fraiser as a blue gorilla.
  • An example of a bad metaphor: I heard some NPR report where one of the writers was claiming they were trying to make the mutant’s right/choice to a decision to being “cured” analogous to women’s rights/choice to have the choice of abortion. Which is why, said this writer, there were protests outside the clinics where mutants were being vaccinated. This just doesn’t work for me. I mean, it seems obvious to me that if you’re a mutant and you have a cool mutation (you can control the weather, fly, shoot flames, turn stuff to ice, make the world blow up, etc.), then you don’t want to be cured. On the other hand, if you have a mutation that sucks (you kill anyone you touch, you’re a big blue gorilla, etc.), then you’d want the cure. I don’t see how this is a metaphor for the more complex decision about abortion.
  • Given that about half the characters get killed off (the professor, Scott, Mystique, in the end Jean, etc.), it seems to me that there must have been some sort of contract negotiation where the actors and the suits got together and the actors said something like “Okay, okay, OKAY already. We’ll do one more. But JUST one!”

I have much less to say about The Squid and The Whale. This is most certainly not a family film– we watched this the other night after Will went to bed. It’s a very good movie about a washed-up novelist who is in the midst of an ugly divorce from his wife, who just happens to be an up and coming writer herself, and also about their two sons who have quite different perspectives on the whole business. It’s one of those comedy/drama flicks– a dramedy? a comrama?– that really was kind of “Oscar bait” in the way it was performed and filmed and paced. Now that I’ve seen it, I’m kind of surprised it didn’t get any nominations– at least I don’t think it did.

And, once again, it’s an example of a movie not to see in the theater. Since it isn’t damn loud and since shit does not blow up real good, this is the kind of movie that can really only be ruined by a family of idiots seated behind you. Unless seen at a more “serious” movie venue like the Michigan Theater, this is the kind of movie best experienced on DVD in the comfort of one’s home. Go rent it if you haven’t seen it yet.

Extra credit answer: Why, it’s none other than Anna Paquin, all grown up.

Two cool tech/computer things

I came across a couple of interesting tech things this morning. I know that the first one, Flickrexport, which I came across via cbd, actually works. Basically, it allows you to export from iPhoto directly to a Flickr account. Reason number 3,404,678 to get a Mac.

The second one is a WordPress plugin, a Trackback validator, which mainly seems to be a way to track spam. I haven’t tried this one out, but it reminds me once again that the “to do” list this summer includes updating this and my unofficial blog.

Does it matter being at a "top tier school" anymore? No, but maybe yes

Kind of an interesting article in Inside Higher Ed this morning called “Losing Their Edge?” It’s about a study of economics departments that is trying to suggest that “the internet” has lead to a flattening out of the heirarchies between different economics departments and being at a “top 20” econ program doesn’t mean as much as it used to. Here’s a quote:

The basic approach of the research was to examine the productivity of professors at elite universities (defined as the top 25 in economics and finance) in the 1970s, ’80s, and ’90s. What the scholars found isn’t good news for those top departments. In the 1970s, a faculty member moving from a non-top 25 university to Harvard University would nearly double in productivity (based on various measures of journal publishing, which is where most economics research appears). By the 1990s, this impact had almost entirely disappeared.

Beyond Harvard, the study found that moving to 17 of the top economics departments would have had a significant positive impact on productivity during the 1970s, while moving only to 5 of them had a significant negative impact on productivity. By the 1990s, only 2 such departments were having a positive impact on productivity while 9 had a significant negative impact.

It goes without saying that this study, at least as described in this Inside Higher Ed piece, sounds kinda fuzzy if you ask me. And, of course, I am not in economics. But I have to say that there is a grain of truth to it, and I certainly see communication technologies like the web (and, once upon a time, things like gopher), email, and other internet search tools figuring into my own Ph.D. education and my current practices as a happy academic.

I earned my Ph.D. at Bowling Green State University— a good school for composition and rhetoric, but not exactly the “center of the academic world.” But technology made it considerably less far-flung. For example, I did most of my research with OhioLINK, a service that essentially allowed me to browse and borrow books from a whole bunch of different university libraries in Ohio. Unlike an inter-library loan request, I could do an OhioLINK search with no paperwork and I could expect to get my requests in a day or two. So instead of using just BGSU’s library (which was pretty good), I was using a whole bunch of libraries.

Another example: back then, MBU, an email list discussion about computers and writing stuff, was very active. For me, MBU served as both an instructional medium– that is, I learned a ton of stuff from the discussion on this list, things about the connections between writing instruction and technology that I wasn’t getting anywhere else– and as a space where I was able to participate in a discussion with colleagues (fellow grad students at other schools, senior “big name” faculty at fancier schools, and everyone in between) in the field. As the writer(s) note in this Inside Higher Ed piece, forums like MBU have made it possible for scholars to talk with others all over the world, while in the old days, scholars talked mostly with people down the hall and/or “across the quad.”

It’s strange to me that mailing list discussions have either dried up (MBU went off-line in 1997, and it’s replacement, tech-rhet, is basically stopped) or have turned into kind of annoying spaces (WPA-L has these tendencies). Perhaps a lot of the discussion has moved to the blogosphere, which is a shame since I for one see blogs as a poor substitute for electronic mail list discussions. Perhaps it’s just me though; perhaps I’ve moved to a place in my training where I don’t “need” the email discussion forums as much as I did way back when.

So, heirarchies have flattened, at least a bit. Does this mean that being at a “tier 1” school no longer matters? Of course not, and the Inside Higher Ed piece makes that clear as well.

I think there is still a lot of unspoken heirarchies in place in hiring practices, even in a field like comp/rhet, which is considerably less “stuffy” and traditional than fields like philosophy, history, or literature. Basically, it is very difficult to rise above one’s academic class: someone who holds a Ph.D. from what is largely a regional state university (me) is unlikely to secure a position at a flagship state university– the U of Michigan, Michigan State, and University of North Carolinas of the world. Further, there is a difference between working at a university like EMU versus a university like the University of Michigan, most of which are probably obvious: money, teaching load, institutional facilities, support, etc., etc.

Of course, there are certain interesting advantages at working at an “opportunity-granting” university like EMU too, advantages that are often overlooked by status/heirarchy-minded academics. But that’s another post.