Steven D. Krause’s Official Blog

Oh, I’m not giving up blogging– that’s not it at all. I’ve just decided to merge this blog with my unofficial blog and have it all together at stevendkrause.com Update your links and go check out the new space!

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I’m in the process of updating/upgrading my RSS feeds on blogs and my own blog spaces– look for an alert to a new blog address soon– and through this process, I stumbled across an entry on Nels “A Delicate Boy” Highberg’s blog (and he cites a much longer and detailed entry at the pseudo-anonymous blogger’s “New Kid on the Hallway” site) about a book called How to Write a Lot: A Practical Guide to Productive Academic Writing by Paul J. Silvia. I think both of these other blogs do a much better job than I can in terms of a review/explanation, particularly NKH.

What I take from these reviews is that Silvia is trying to make two basic points. First, write every day/often/just do it/etc. Second, put writing time into your schedule, and he (apparently) argues that academics ought to schedule the time of their writing just like they would schedule the time of their teaching. No excuses.

Now, this is all fine and good advice, it’s one of the main lessons I learned as a writer over the years, it’s advice I give my grad students working on projects, and it’s advice I have been trying to follow myself in my own writing this last year. But I’ve struggled lately to follow this advice, and it makes me think about it a bit. In the opening pages Style, Lessons in Clarity and Grace, one of my favorite books on writing style (and writing advice of a sort, I suppose), Joseph Williams kind of mocks this sort of simplistic advice. He says something like “Telling me that I need to ‘be clear’” (and here Williams is making a not so veiled reference to Strunk and White’s famous advice book) “is like telling me to hit the ball squarely. I know that. What I need to know is how.”

It also seems to me that the advice on scheduling writing time and sticking to it no matter what is the sort of advice that either a) works in theory better than in practice, and/or b) is advice that comes from someone who doesn’t teach courses that involve a lot of time spent grading/responding to student writing. Interestingly enough, b) might very well be correct: Silvia is a Psychology professor, and he might not have to spend as much time reading and commenting on student writing. Time and the teaching of writing expands and contracts. The time I would have spent this morning writing I spent instead on commenting on short student projects– and thank God I’m just teaching one class (the other half of sabbatical lite is perhaps kicking in) and these were short essays. When I’m teaching a full load next year, this issue will be even more significant, though conversely, I hopefully won’t have to spend as much time with service/administrative stuff, which also has a way of expanding and contracting.

Anyway, then there is also the “bags of shit er, timesuck” that drop from the sky on academics everywhere: the request from some administrator for a detailed report that is due in two days, the brouhahas that get stirred up from nowhere and that demand immediate and exquisite attention, the emergency a student advisee has in terms of some kind of graduation audit or fee. Not to mention life in general.

And then, then there is also the distraction of other writing that takes away from “THE WRITING,” things like, well, this blog post.

Anyway, none of this is to discount Silvia’s advice. I am sure it is sound.

And be sure to eat write er right, don’t drink too much, get plenty of exercise, get plenty of sleep, spend quality time with your family and friends, read good books, watch good movies, recycle. And just write.

Categories: Sabbatical Lite, BAWS, Writing, Scholarship
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Computerworld (and other sources, I think) is reporting that a “Professor uses blog to get peer review of academic book.” The professor in question here is Noah Wardrip-Fruin, and he’s an assistant professor in communication at UC-San Diego, and the blog in question is Grand Text Auto. Here’s a link to the blog post where Wardrip-Fruin kicks things off. And there are some other links in the article to sites like if:book. Actually, the Future of the Book folks make what I think is one of the key observations: this is being done with the complete blessing of MIT Press.

Of course, I like to think that this is all an idea that others had before, at least in theory.

Wardrip-Fruin’s book sounds like an interesting read. I’m more than a wee-bit swamped with things I’ve assigned to students, essays that need some responses, etc., etc., but it might be kind of fun to stop in on the GTA discussion.

Oh, duh. This was also in the CHE.

Categories: Writing, Scholarship, Blogging about blogging
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Finally, finally FINALLY, I’m starting to send out my “Blogs as Writerly Spaces” survey. I feel like I’m literally about a year behind on this project for reasons that are both bad (my own laziness, my lack of focus, distractions that are too easily found, etc.) and good or at least inevitable (unexpected and expected school things, other scholarly side projects, “real life,” etc.). The process of writing the survey took longer than I thought it should have, getting it approved through the Human Subject Review process (what everyone else calls IRB) took a while, I decided to wait for a while longer to get some funding from EMU to pay for this survey, and then, just as I was getting ready to send this out, someone in my department decided to stir up the politics I vaguely elude to in my last post, and that of course sucked up far too much time.

But finally, I’ve started surveying folks and the results are trickling back in.

I don’t want to say anything too specific about this right now because it’s way early and I expect to be collecting a lot more data over the next year or so. My methodology is to invite bloggers via email to participate, and I’m trying to invite as many different kinds of bloggers as I can (I’m trying to minimize the number of academic bloggers I survey since I don’t want this project to be a long and hard stare in the mirror). I started by visiting some friends’ blogs and a few other blogs I read on a fairly regular basis, and then visiting their links and then their links and so forth. I will probably try to contact bloggers listed in things like technorati (hey, why not try to survey popular blogs?), and I might have to try some other tactics (including this entry– see below) to recruit some participants. I don’t know if this surveying process is truly random or scientific per se, but short of the kind of resources and expertise of groups/organizations like Nielsen and the Pew Research Center (and people question those studies all the time, of course), I think this is about as close as I’m going to get. So call it pseudo-random.

Like I said, I’ve only been doing this for a couple days, but two things I’ll mention that I’ve noticed so far: first, I am inevitably and unintentionally screening participants based on valid email addresses available via their blogs (or their profiles on various blogging services). I suppose I could invite people to participate in my survey by posting a comment on their blog, and I have been surprised by is the number of blogs/bloggers that do not provide any contact information. So I hadn’t thought about this.

Second, and I had thought about this when I started this project, I think am going to have a really REALLY difficult time getting ex-bloggers (e.g., people who used to keep a blog and then abandoned it for some reason) to participate in this project. I’ve been trying to invite these folks when I come across their dead blogs, but they often lack contact information and the ones I have tried emailing bounced back to me. So this part could be tricky.

By the way, if anyone reading this wants to participate in my survey, shoot me an email at stevendkrause at gmail dot com with your blog address (and your email address, obviously), and I’ll send you the survey link. I’m especially interested in hearing from you if you are an “ex-blogger” who wrote not exclusively all about academic stuff. And hey, I’d even be willing to include a few academic blogs in all this….

Categories: BAWS, Scholarship
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It’s been kind of a bad week around here because of some unpleasant politics among department faculty. Obviously, I’m not going to comment on the specifics of the issues, but in the general and “Happy Academic” sense, I thought I’d offer some random thoughts about academic politics/fights I’ve seen, including this one:

• As the saying goes, the politics in academia are so ugly because the stakes are so low. But when the stakes become about something that at least one group of people see as “something,” that’s when they can get really really ugly.
• It’s amazing how a group of faculty who are otherwise not empowered or involved in things can cause a big fight.
• People who have advanced degrees in fields like English are just as capable as anyone else of misreading texts and/or writing things with one supposed intention when it would appear to others to have the exact opposite intention. In other words, we all bring our own “terministic screens” to the party. The wikipedia entry on Kenneth Burke describes terministic screens as “a set of symbols that becomes a kind of screen or grid of intelligibility through which the world makes sense to us. Here Burke offers rhetorical theorists and critics a way of understanding the relationship between language and ideology. Language, Burke thought, doesn’t simply “reflect” reality; it also helps select reality as well as deflect reality.” That sounds about right to me, and in this particular situation (and many others in English departments everywhere), I think the screens that literature scholars assume are completely different from the ones that composition/rhetoric scholars assume.
• Way back when I was in my PhD program and just starting out as an assistant professor, I used to think that senior faculty who were “dead wood” got that way just because they were lazy and they gave up. I suppose with some folks, that is true. But I’m beginning to think that most of these people are actually “dead wood” because they are battle-scarred from old poly-ticks. And I’m beginning to have a lot more sympathy for that.
• These things can turn into just an ENORMOUS time suck, both in the time it takes to engage in the argument, the reconciliation, the aftermath, etc., and in the sense of just mental and spiritual energy that one would normally devote to things like teaching or scholarship. A few days and I feel a month behind.
• Academic politics and the arguments that ensue are like icebergs in that everyone worries about and talks about the surface, but everyone also knows that so much is submerged, invisible, and unseen.

There’s probably more to say, but in the spirit of actually getting caught up, I think I’ll stop.

Oh, I do feel like I should mention this opening paragraph from this Inside Higher Ed article, “Learning From Cats:”

Academic squabbles are often compared to cat fights, but as one who has owned cats for several decades, I’ve come to believe that such analogies are unfair to felines. Cats, for instance, instinctively know to terminate a chase when they would consume more calories than their prey would provide. And even the pugilist tabbies I’ve owned eventually learned to give wide berth to rivals who consistently bloodied them. All of this suggests that cats may be more evolutionarily advanced than a lot of academics.

Of course, I’m kind of a dog person….

Categories: The Happy Academic, EMU
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I was talking on the phone the other day with an old friend of mine and in the course of our meandering conversation, her mentioned/recommended Scrivener, an Apple only software that is a word processor that is designed for “writers” with all kinds of compelling-looking features. You can try it 30 days for free and it’s only $40 after that, so I will probably monkey around with it anyway. But I’m sort of curious if anyone reading this message now has played around with it themselves.

The main question I have in my own mind is this: is this software that will help me be more efficient/”write better,” or is this software that will help me procrastinate/goof off?

Categories: Sabbatical Lite, BAWS, Writing, Technology, Scholarship
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This has been one of those weeks where stuff has piled up and then cascaded by me. One thing after another, and yet, not really that much of significance at the same time. If that makes sense. The one thing that I did learn/remind myself about is that “time management” with any kind of release time, sabbatical lite or otherwise, because I felt like I spent way WAY too much time getting my class in line, way WAY too little time working on my sabbatical lite project, and basically no time blogging.

So, in an effort to at least get caught up on the blogging, I offer a variety of links to stuff I’ve been reading lately:

• Something that I haven’t played with yet but that looks potentially valuable: PDF Hammer.
• Here’s a link to a conference that would be cool but that I am unlikely to go to….
• This might be a good novel, but even better is the web site. Maybe?
• On EMUTalk.org, I have been pushing the no-brainer idea of EMU outsourcing its email. I am glad that the Community College Dean agrees with me.
• Why We do Dumb or Irrational Things: 10 Brilliant Social Psychology Studies, from PsyBlog. Not the sort of thing I would normally post here, but kind of interesting nonetheless.

And then today, I came across a couple of handy videos. First, there’s this one on Facebook:

Kind of interesting, though some of the connections they’re making here between the Facebook crowd and the CIA seem like they might be a bit of a stretch to me.

And, on a more cheerful note, this CommonCraft video about Online Photo Sharing:

Definitely a teachable moment here….

Categories: Sabbatical Lite, BAWS, Blogging about blogging
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This looks potentially useful, the University of California– Santa Barbara English Department Knowledge Base Wiki. I came across this because someone on one of my mailing lists posted a link to the “Toy Chest” on this site, which has oodles of links to different tools and things on the ‘net that could be useful. I’ll probably post this same entry to my 516 blog, too…

Categories: Teaching
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Of the winter term, that is, what every other university I know of refers to as “spring.” Though I have to say that calling this time of the year the “winter” term makes perfect sense, especially in Michigan, where winter is certainly in full effect through late March, when spring really starts, and quite often long after that, too.

In any event, on tap for me as of tomorrow for this term:

• “Sabbatical Lite” continues since I am teaching but one class, doing administrative stuff, and still doing research. Once again, we’ll see how this works out. Since I have been granted some modest funding, I’m hoping/planning on getting my surveymonkey blog survey up and running for the “Blogs as Writerly Spaces” project. With a little luck, I’ll start collecting some cool data.
• I’m teaching “Computers and Writing, Theory and Practice” again, which is a required course in our MA in the Teaching of Writing program. The course is pretty much what it’s about, although there is a focus on pedagogy that isn’t really in the title. It’s online again, and I’ve decided to experiment/try doing the whole class on emuonline this time around, meaning there isn’t going to be a class web site. Students will still have to make web sites, I will have my own little blog for the class (as will the students), and we’re going to do some cool stuff with wikis and video at different points of the term that I am hosting outside of emuonline. So maybe I’ll post some links to things here as the term goes on.
  
  I really like teaching this course, but it is always a challenge to get it together. I think I know what we’re going to be doing in general every week, but around half of the readings right now are still in the “TBA” stage. I was talking about this today with a colleague of mine: the great thing about being in computers and writing is it’s always new and interesting and changing and stuff. The bad thing though is that it’s always new and changing. If I taught rhetorical theory or the history of rhetoric class, I don’t think I’d have to scrap 2/3rds of the syllabus every year.
• Speaking of computers and writing and collecting some good blog writing practices data, I need to get a proposal together for Computers and Writing in Georgia. I doubt I’ll end up proposing anything that has to do with the conference theme on open source software though; we’ll see what happens, I guess.
• And this semester will mark the end of my term as the writing program coordinator, or at least that’s the plan. This is a job that involves running our undergraduate and graduate programs in writing, it’s a job that rotates around a bit, and it’ll be time for someone else to do it soon. There will be some transition during the spring and summer of course, but this is the last term where I expect a lot of meetings and such associated with this.

I know there are many MANY more things on my “to do” list for the term already, but for the time-being, I think the best thing I can do is get to bed so I can get that bright-eyed/bushy-tailed feeling.

Categories: BAWS, Sabbatical Lite, The Happy Academic, Scholarship, Teaching, EMU
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No time to actually read this right now (let alone write about it) because we’re wrapping up the Florida leg of our holidaze break, but via danah boyd comes this info about a Pew Center study on how teens use the ‘net. Could be useful for 516, which I’ve been working on here poolside among the palms. Tomorrow morning, on an airplane and tomorrow afternoon, back to the snow and the grey.

Categories: Scholarship, Teaching, Blogging about blogging
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