Month: October 2007

On watching CourtTV

It’s been a pretty busy week around here in general– surprisingly, because at the beginning of the week, I thought I was going to have a lot more time to write and read than I thought I would. One of my interruptions this week has been the Orange Taylor trial and its coverage on CourtTV. This has been a topic of conversation on the community blog I run, EMUTalk.org, for months and months– here’s a link to the category on that blog. More details there than you could shake a stick at, but basically, Orange Taylor is on trial as I type for the murder of Laura Dickinson last December, a murder that EMU administrators essentially covered up and that cost some of them, notably President John Fallon, their jobs.

Now the Taylor trial is the “featured trial” on CourtTV– they’re calling it the “Dorm Room Murder.” Normally, I don’t watch CourtTV, but since this is a very local story for me, I’ve been tuning in when I can.The coverage I’m watching is just the audio of the interview with Taylor before he was charged with anything, so what you hear is a recording made back in January (where they are talking about a crime in December 2006 and where they are discussing pictures and videos and such from back then) and video of the court live. Right now, they’re focusing on Taylor and the police officer who conducted the interview reading the transcript of the audio.

I have to say it’s fascinating viewing. Again, it might just be that I’m more interested because it is something that is happening here– literally, I could ride my bike to the court house and I’ll be on campus later today. But just the way this is presented, with all these different mediums mashed together to make the story and compelling TV.

And it isn’t just a “the facts and only the facts” kind of presentation. CourtTV anchors interrupt the trial about every 15 minutes or so before the commercial breaks and to usually talk to lawyer commentators. Now, I’m no lawyer and everyone is presumed innocent and such, but without going into any detail, the evidence against Orange Taylor is pretty overwhelming. But in the world of CourtTV, “reasonable doubt” is key: commentators talk about whether or not the interview was even legal, about the validity of Taylor’s story, etc., etc. And it occurred to me that in TV-land, they have to do this. If the commentators came on and said “oh, he’s guilty as hell,” then most viewers would turn the channel.

I don’t know exactly what that all says (and maybe it’s patently obvious), but I still think it’s interesting.

One other thing I’ve learned from this: if the police ask you to come in for an interview for any reason (well, unless you are clearly the victim of a crime), bring a lawyer. Taylor, who is proving himself not to be one of EMU’s best and brightest in this interview, more or less gives the police all that they need to file charges against him just through this “informal interview.”

Mom's blog (but I won't call them moggers or bloms)/Messy Media on making money

From one of my google alerts comes this kind of cheezy article, “A blog of one’s own: Blogging moms find a way to have their say,” from the Press and Sun-Bulletin of Greater Binghampton, NY. It’s nothing too brilliant; just a feature piece trying to claim that the new “soccer mom” is the “blogging mom.” This is a typical quote: “Call them “mogs,” “moggers” or “bloms” — whatever you like — one thing is certain: A slew of blogging mothers are finding that writing a daily or weekly dispatch online makes them feel better about it all.”

Also from my google alters comes this, “Messy Media hopes blogs will be money makers,” from Press Gazette UK. It’s another one of these stories about bloggers hoping/planning on making money from their efforts, though the twist here is that Messy Media is a start-up with some former print journalist making the jump to blogs and the like. And there are a few numbers here about how much money people can (or, as far as I can tell, can’t) make from commercial blogging.

"The students/kids today"

Sandy Anderson at Kansas State posted a link to this at the WPA-L mailing list: this is (one of the?) latest videos from Mike Wesch also at Kansas State University, the guy who did “The Machine is Us/ing Us” last year. This latest video is more of a collaborative effort about the ways today’s students are “different” in terms of technology and such, and while it is clever and interesting, I don’t personally find it as compelling of an argument. My students are all over the map in terms of age, college readiness, socio-economic background, etc., which makes them more all over the map in terms of technical sophistication. And after all, the quote they begin with from McLuhan about how “today’s student” is bewildered by the 19th century environment of “today’s education” was written the year after I was born. So I see Wesch et al.’s point, but only to a, um, point.

This did lead me to the site he must be using for these projects and his teaching, mediatedcultures.net @ kansas state university and there are a lot of goodies here potentially useful for teaching. I haven’t looked at it yet, but the Digital Ethnography of YouTube project looks particularly promising. Good stuff for teaching 516 for sure, and maybe things like 444 or even 328, too.

Rejection, finally

I finally heard officially that my proposal for the CCCCs this year has been rejected. And that bothers me.

It’s not that I am that bothered about not being on the program this year. I mean, I’m of course disappointed because I thought it was a good proposal. But frankly, I don’t really need to give anymore conference presentations at this point in my career, and, without going into great detail here, I think I’ll be able to re-purpose my proposal for Computers and Writing or another conference easily enough. And since I’ll be spending my meager travel funds at NCTE in New York City next month, I was going to have to pay for all of the CCCCs out of pocket if I was on the program or not.

What bothers me is I am not hearing about this until the middle of October. That’s about a month and a half late.

Now, if I did actually have plans of having some travel money available and if EMU wasn’t in the midst of a financial mess (really, the whole state of Michigan) that will probably make getting funding from other sources on campus difficult if not impossible this year, this would have/could have been a problem. I would have probably had to apply for funding by this point in the process.

And beyond that, why the heck does it take over six months to get an official answer on this? The CCCCs is a big conference of course, and I understand there were some issues regarding space with the hotel in New Orleans. But it’s not that big of a conference and they could have obviously figured out the issues with the venue long before September. If reviewers, the chair, and/or people at NCTE are just going to sit on the proposals for several months, then why not move the deadline for submissions to June or July?

From what I’ve been able to gather from various sources, there was a “first round” of invitations sent out, some things the chair was going to pick personally, and then they were waiting for people to accept or decline coming to the conference before they sent out another round of invites. When did this become the policy? I always thought the CCCCs was pretty much entirely blind submission, and this is the first time in the 12 or 13 years I’ve been going to this thing where I’ve heard of multiple rounds of review based on who has accepted an invitation in the first round.

It all strikes me as rather bizarre.

But I’ll probably go to the CCCCs this year anyway (along with my wife). Why? New Orleans, baby, New Orleans! I’ll carve out a space for some conference stuff, for some fine dining, some French Quarter bar crawling, etc., and I suppose like a lot of other people, I’m kind of curious to see some of the Katrina damage first-hand. So even with these conference hick-ups, I’m sure it will be a fine event.

Just how dangerous is the Wii?

Wii jacketAs a registered Wii owner, I received an email from Nintendo telling me that I can get a free Wii jacket for my Wii controllers. As the email said, “The Wii Remote Jacket provides cushioning for the Wii Remote for people who might accidentally throw or drop their Wii Remotes while playing games.”

I have to say that throwing or dropping the controller has not been an issue, but banging it into the coffee table has been– we don’t really have enough room in the living room for optimal Wii-ing. So I don’t know who’s throwing or dropping all of these controllers.

Speaking of Wii-ing: we haven’t been playing much, I think just because this is such the busy time of year for everyone– even quasi-sabbatical boy me– and we just haven’t had the time or desire. Last night Annette was teaching, so it was just me and Will. At first, I thought we were going to Wii. Then he said he wanted to watch Buffy the Vampire Slayer, which we’ve been working our way through for a few weeks now. Then Goosebumps came on and that became the choice. Maybe he was too pooped to Wii.

Since I have a cold this morning and am in no mood to go to the gym, perhaps a little Wii is in my near future….

A way to opt out of catalogs, perhaps

I haven’t checked this out yet, but I stumbled across a service called Catalog Choice, which promises a way to eliminate all of those catalogs that show up uninvited at the house, especially around the holidays. Annette and I have both ordered a few things over the years, I think primarily from Signals, and it seems like once you order from one of these things, you get 100 different catalogs from weird and bizarre places where you would never order anything. If I could stop this crap showing up in my mailbox in the first place, it would be a good thing.

Is the 'net good for writing?

Via Kottke.org I came across this RU Sirius blog post on 10 Zen Monkeys, “Is the Net Good for Writers?” wherein RU (just “R” for short?) asks some writers this question. It’s kind of interesting, I guess, I’ll have to read it more closely later for the BAWS thing, and it might be useful for teaching. But I think the answer is kind of obviously yes. I like how Clay Shirky turned the question; here’s a quote:

Dear Mr. Sirius, I read with some interest your request to comment on whether Herr Gutenberg’s new movable type is good for books and for scribes. I have spent quite a bit of time thinking about the newly capable printing press, and though the invention is just 40 years old, I think we can already see some of the outlines of the coming changes.

First, your question “is it good for books and for scribes?” seems to assume that what is good for one must be good for the other. Granted, this has been true for the last several centuries, but the printing press has a curious property — it reduces the very scarcity of writing that made scribal effort worthwhile, so I would answer that it is great for books and terrible for scribes. Thanks to the printing press, we are going to see more writing, and more kinds of writing, which is wonderful for the reading public, and even creates new incentives for literacy. Because of these improvements, however, the people who made their living from the previous scarcity of books will be sorely discomfited.

Exactly.

Blogging scholarship competition/Blog World Expo

I found via Alex Halavais’ blog that there’s a blogging scholarship out there. It’s being sponsored by what I guess is a commercial enterprise, College Scholarships.org, though I don’t really know how you make money by giving away scholarship money. In any event, the prize money/scholarship here of $10,000 will go to one college student’s blog based on a list of 20 finalist that they came up with in some way.

If nothing else, I’m interested in this list of bloggers as potential study subjects. I think. Lately, I have been thinking that I am less interested in blog writers who have a large and adoring audience or bloggers who blog to make money and more interested in the vast majority of bloggers who have a tiny tiny audience. And as bloggers who happen to be students, these folks might cross into the “academic” realm of bloggers which I’m also trying to avoid studying. Still, this is a good list of what at least one group described as “good blogs,” and that might fit into a teaching experience like ENGL 516 or ENGL 444.

Incidentally, there is also an ad on these sites for something called the Blog World & New Media Expo. It is rather cheap– especially compared to the conference I mentioned the other day– and it would automatically be fun because it’s going to be in Vegas. But it sure seems to be nothing more than a conference on how to make money with your blog. I guess “making money” has always been a motivation to write, but I think it’s fair to say that this is a pretty naive motivation. I went to a reading last night given by a former EMU colleague, Jeff Parker, who has a new novel out from a very small and literary press, and one of the questions from one of the young people in the crowd was along the lines of “how much money are you going to make from this?” Parker kind of looked around, and without directly answering, more or less said what was true, “probably none, but lightening does strike once in a while.”