Month: August 2008

“Online Universities are Gaining Acceptance, Pollster Says”

Kind of an interesting article in the Chronicle of Higher Education, “Online Universities Are Gaining Acceptance, Pollster Says.” It strikes me as a bit dubious because the claim of the headline comes from a book by John Zogby called The Way We’ll Be: The Zogby Report on the Transformation of the American Dream, “which is based on Zogby International polls and other studies, also touches on public attitudes toward politics, consumer habits, spirituality, and international affairs, and on what men and women really do want from each other.”

That sounds a bit too much like everything and the kitchen sink for me to make much about a claim that higher ed and the online world, and there’s a big difference between an “online university” and a university that has some online offerings. According to CHE, Zogby talks about higher ed in the same chapter he talks about car sharing companies, blogs, and microbrewed beer. Sure, those things all go together….

I don’t think there is any question that online courses and online programs are more popular and more accepted than they were even five years ago, and it is not at all difficult for me to imagine a future where the vast majority of college students take at least some classes online. But I don’t think we’ll all be attending college online while driving around our shared cars and drinking our microbrewed beer anytime soon.

But I still want an iPhone– I think

While procrastinating this morning (I am seemingly having to recover from my vacation with some more self-inflicted time off, which I can’t afford for all kinds of different reasons), I came across this entry on LifeHacker, “Forget the iPhone– The iTouch is Good Enough.” Among other things, it gives lots of neat tips/ideas/links for software for both a cell phone and an iTouch. I did figure out that I can activate my phone’s web browsing capabilities for $5 a month, and then from there, I can do various google things. And I have an iTouch in hand…

I still think my next cell phone is going to be an iPhone– unless Google gets its act together and gets their open source phone stuff off the ground. In any event, some good links and stuff in this article.

Las Vegas (et al) 2008: The Flickr set

Mandalay BayI was going to write more here about our Las Vegas vacation, but I decided to just let the pictures and videos speak for themselves. Here’s a link to the set.

On the whole, I don’t think Annette and I are going to be heading off to Vegas a couple of times a year after this trip, but I can see heading back in less than seven years.

Snow globe terrorism (and Las Vegas fancy eating)

I don’t know if I should be starting my Las Vegas narrative at the end like this, but I will anyway since it’s what is on my mind right now:

Annette and I decided to do carry-on luggage for this trip to keep it simple, and it was working great until we tried to go through security here in Las Vegas. I bought a couple snow globes to add to my collection– yes, I collect snow globes– and thought nothing of them crammed into my luggage. Apparently, TSA had other ideas. They told me that snow globes count in the liquids ban for carry-on luggage, and I was given the choice of either checking my bag or mailing my snow globes back home.

I opted for the checked bag route, and I was escorted around back toward the gate by a TSA person, who was perfectly pleasant about it all. “Snow globes,” I said to this woman. “Really?”

“Yeah, I’m sorry about that,” she said. “They tell us we’re supposed to be on the look-out for them, actually.”

“Yes,” I said, “because if we are allowed to pack snow globes in our carry-on luggage, then the terrorists win.” She kinda smiled at that. And a quick google search reveals I’m not the only one who thinks this about the TSA crusade snow globe purge, either.

Happily, that was the biggest hassle of the trip– well, so far, since I am writing this in the Las Vegas airport and not at home. There is that whole “what happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas” spiel, but since I am actually still in Vegas, enjoying the free wifi, and I have some time to kill before the flight, I thought I’d give a run-down of the trip.
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A Vegas prelude trip

In my experience, when I’ve told people that Annette and I are going to Las Vegas, there are two basic reactions. On the one hand, there’s “Oooh, where are you staying? You should go and see such and such,” and so forth. On the other hand, there’s “Oooh, why in the heck would you do that? Las Vegas is like a level of hell,” and so forth. There isn’t that much in-between.

Obviously, we’re in the first camp, though not because we are that interested in gambling. We went about eight years ago, and I think between the two of us, we lost $150. What Las Vegas was good for then (and hopefully will be good for this time around) is just gawking at all of the excess, all the extremes that are America. Las Vegas is the kind of town where it is perfectly acceptable to be walking down the strip at 3 am in a tuxedo or in your pajamas, where you can spend pretty much as much or as little as you want, where you can buy a Prada purse, look at a pretty convincing fake Eiffel tower, and get handed flyers for porn all in the same block.

But as a prelude to Vegas, we first stopped in Chicago and then Iowa. Chicago was an impromptu event. We ended up with a Priceline deal at the Hyatt Regency on Wacker, which was quite nice. I think we ended up paying more money for parking and a bar tab with our friends Troy and Lisa than we did on the actual room. But before we went out with Troy and Lisa, who I’ve known for like 25 or 30 years and who have given us a lot of good Vegas travel advice, Annette and Will and I went to the Navy Pier. It was pretty good people-watching, walking around, festive and park-like atmosphere. We ended up going through a maze (Will’s idea) that was over-priced but kinda fun, and a stained glass museum that was surprisingly good.  Okay touristy fun in beautiful summer weather.

Now we’re in Iowa with the Krause grandparents. While Annette and I are in Vegas, Will is going to be staying for the biannual “kid camp,”where the grandparents get lots of quality time with the kiddies. He’ll have fun, though sometimes Will’s only child-ness kicks in on visits like this.

Anyway, I was originally planning for a “computer blackout” period during this trip, but since I am teaching an online class right now, those plans have changed.  Just as well; it’ll give me a chance to post some pictures and such from the road.

“The Trolls Among Us”

From The New York Times coming out this Sunday, “The Trolls Among Us.” I don’t have time to read it too much right now– I’m getting ready to go to Vegas, which my millions of readers will read about soon– but maybe I’ll pick up a copy of the NYT on Sunday for a change of pace. It looks like potential reading for a number of the classes I teach.

Farewell, web page assignment

I am trying to get my ducks in a row for English 328 for the fall, a term that will see a couple of “firsts” and/or “haven’t done that in a long time” sort of milestones for me. It will be the first time in a long time where I have taught a “full load” because I have no administrative/quasi-administrative obligations next year. It will be the first time in three or so years (not counting the year I was both the writing program coordinator and the WPA) in which I will teach all on campus– no online courses for me in the fall.

And, and I say this with some sadness, it will be the first time since I started teaching English 328 ten years ago where I will not be including some kind of “make your own simple web page” assignment.

There’s basically three reasons why I decided to axe this assignment.

First, I really wanted to include a simple video/movie assignment in the class and something had to go. I think the “invent your own writing technology” (where students have to make things and reflect on some of the theories of writing as a technology readings from people like Ong and Baron and the like) is really fundamental to the whole idea of the course, that writing is a technology and the technologies we use to write has a direct impact on what/how/why we write. I think the “style project” (where students read, compare, analyze, and write about a couple of style manuals, my current choices being Strunk and White and Williams’ Style: Toward in Clarity and Grace) because I think it’s critical that students in this advanced writing course think about and pay very close attention to their writing in this nitty-gritty sort of way. In theory, most of the people who take English 328 are wanting to be some flavor of professional writer (journalist, PR person, tech writer, etc.) or a high school teacher. It seems to me that those people ought to have some critical awareness of “the rules.” And I didn’t want to give up on the comic assignment because it’s still comparatively new to me, it’s a great way to introduce the connection between “the visual” and text, and it will serve as a great gateway to a motion picture/multimedia project. So in an odd way, the web site became kind of the odd man out.

Second, there’s a lot of other ways nowadays to publish stuff on the web and a lot of other ways to incorporate a set of “technology literacy skills” into a class like English 328– Google docs and various related tools, blogger, flickr, wiki software, chat software, audio tools, YouTube, etc., etc.  All this “web 2.0” stuff, whatever that means.  And a pretty good argument could be made that for most students in English 328, students who tend not to keep maintaining a web site after the class is over, these other writing and literacy tools are a whole lot more useful than learning how to make and revise a simple web site.

And third– oh, I don’t know, I guess it’s just not that relevant anymore.  Static web sites are still useful– I’m in the process of creating a new one here for my English 328 materials—  but in an age of blogging tools, facebook, linkedin, myspace, etc., etc., does it really matter if someone has something like a “homepage” anymore?  I abandoned that assignment in English 444:  Writing for the World Wide Web last term and instead had students convert/re-purpose a print text to the web, and I think that was a more useful and better assignment.

This might not work out.  I think a pretty compelling argument can be made that basic HTML and basic CSS are still fundamental building blocks to all things web and web 2.0-oriented.  I might be doing students a disservice by skipping these details.  But after 10 years– more than that, if you count the times I was teaching web page authoring before EMU– I think it’s time to give this one a rest.