Category: Academia

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iPad “killer apps” for Academics (maybe)

Okay, one more iPad post, and then on with my regular (not necessarily relevant) postings.

Being an iPad expert (as I have owned one for an entire week now), I’m still pretty darn happy and impressed with it. So far, it’s mostly for me what it has been billed as:  a great “experience” for reading/consuming text, audio, and video.  It is not (for the zillionth time) a computer, though for me, it is something like a netbook.  I realize that this wouldn’t be true for everyone, especially non-Apple computer people, but since the rest of my computers are Apples, the iPad syncs and “just works,” which wouldn’t be the case if I was working with some kind of Windoze netbook.

Typing is an issue, but that’s the case with netbooks too, right?  For me, I can touch-type well enough on the iPad when it’s landscape mode, but if I’m going to type anything longer than a couple paragraphs or an email response (or this blog post), then I’m going to use a real computer.  I might break down and eventually buy a keyboard for the iPad, but that would kind of defeat the purpose of the lean simplicity of the iPad.

And it doesn’t strike me as particularly “magical” either, though given the fondness for fantasy and science fiction in my household, perhaps my standards and definitions of “magical” are different than Steve Jobs.  All the things the iPad does best– stuff like IMDB, Yahoo Entertainment, Netflix, various weather and newspaper apps, photos, music, videos, etc.– are all great, but not really beneficial for my job as a writing professor.  Safari is okay (very quick, but, as the entire world knows, no Flash) and email is great, but neither are reasons to get an iPad.

I have played around with Keynote and Pages a bit, and while there’s some potential, I have to say I’ve been a little disappointed.  On the plus-side (as I wrote about with this post earlier), both Keynote and Pages demonstrate that the iPad is indeed a device with which a user can make content.  But the problem with both apps is that they don’t quite synch with my desktop versions of the software– different fonts, not all the effects and builds work, etc. Plus there are the previously mentioned keyboarding issues. It’s not a deal-breaker by any means, but it does mean that if I take only my iPad to a conference or something instead of a laptop, I’ll have to make some adjustments.  Again, not a reason to get an iPad, at least not yet.

All that said, I do think there are so far two (or three, depending on how you look at it) potential “killer apps” for the iPad:  PDF annotation and books, both iBooks/Kindles, and “books” that are really applications on their own.  Too long of a ramble/review after the jump.

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A little pre-writing on a C&W presentation on mentorship

I’m going to do two presentations at the Computers and Writing conference at Purdue and one of them is called “Virtual Mentorship.” It was a panel cooked up by Derek for a variety of reasons, and I suppose one of the reasons why I’m involved is because I am his officially designated mentor.  And it occurs to me that I ought to start thinking about this….

A few pre-writing thoughts this morning:

  • I have to somehow work into this the “mentor” I had at Southern Oregon University when I started my first job way back when.  I can’t remember this guy’s name (and I should say I don’t exactly blame him for his approach to “mentoring”), but the main thing he wanted to talk about was his retirement plan, not exactly the kind of thing that was on my mind as a starting professor.
  • In my estimation and research about blogging, I think that the best metaphor for community is “parallel play,” which is a common and easily observed practice among toddlers where they don’t so much play together as they play next to each other.  Most bloggers, it seems to me, are interacting next to each other rather than directly with each other, meaning that what counts as “community” is a little more loosely formed.
  • Unlike my institutionally assigned relationship at SOU, mentorship in/through blogs comes indirectly and often anonymously.  I think that the late John Lovas was very much a blogging mentor to me and many others in my cohort of bloggers, though I only met him once and I don’t know to what extent he was aware of his mentoring role.
  • Along these lines: it seems to me that a lot of academic types who I used to follow as bloggers have either stopped entirely and often publicly, or have slowed down so much that they might as well have stopped.  Maybe it’s because they have matured out of toddler-hood and no longer are interested in the side-by-side play that is the blogosphere; maybe, as is usually the case with rhetorical situations, the situation itself has “degraded” and/or reached a point of closure.  Maybe they just got bored.  At first, my reaction to this was “oh, people just don’t blog anymore.”  But really, I think what is happening is that a new generation/cohort of academic and/or comp/rhet bloggers is emerging for me, including Ryan Truman and Brian McNely, not to mention a ton of people I came across/learned about through the Twitter feed for the CCCCs.
  • So really, even though I am a “designated mentor” for Derek and I have served in that function by showing him some of the ropes at the institution and with the main undergraduate class we both teach, it seems to mentorship is a two-way street.  I’m getting as much from him and these other “younger guys” than I’m giving, probably more.
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Krause’s #CCCC10 Recap

As I have discussed in the past, my recent record at getting stuff in at the Conference for College Composition and Communication has been bad.  But I was in this year and had a grand time.  I saw some good talks, got to connect with a lot of old friends and EMU students, played with Twitter and listened to talk about more tech stuff than I have typically at the CCCCs, and I had a lot of tourist fun in Louisville.

I shot some video which I am hoping to put together in the next week or so to show my MA students, many of whom don’t know about what goes on at academic conferences. Here’s a link to some pictures; and after the jump are probably more details than you want to know.

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… why just Twitter?

I saw a couple of interesting and thought-provoking presentations at ATTW today, some of which I might blog about later, but for the time-being, the one on my mind is one done by some folks at Old Dominion University (Liza Potts, Kathie Gossett, and Vincent Rhodes) called “Tweetagogy: Building Community in 140 Characters or Less.” The short version is they were discussing how they used Twitter as a community building tool with students in their PhD program, which is an especially important task since their PhD program includes a lot of students who are some form of “distance learners.”  Check out the Prezi presentation for the full details.

It’s not that I disagree with them– at least not exactly.  I think there’s a lot of potential for Twitter like they are talking about, forming community around a topic/affinity of some sort is one of those ways.  They had a lot of great ideas and suggestions for some software tools to make Twitter work better for this.

Still, why just Twitter?  The responses they are giving me when I asked this question on the ATTW twitter feed were that things like blogs weren’t as successful, that Twitter was easier/blogs were harder, etc., etc.

I dunno.

Like I said, I like Twitter quite a bit, but I also like blogs and facebook and all kinds of stuff.  I think most of our students are the same way.  So it seems to me that these tools can play off of each other quite well, as I’m trying to do here.

And this is more than 140 characters.

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Remainders on my browser

I have a habit of leaving Firefox open with dozens of tabs leading to dozens of things I either intend to read, bookmark, come back to for teaching, etc., and then I get busy with other things and I don’t.  In any event, in an effort to close some windows and to keep track of some of these things later, here’s a list of links to stuff, some of it tied to teaching and scholarship, some of it just kinda cool/interesting to me:

  • SecondBar allows you to have a menu across two monitors, which is how I roll on my desktop computer.  Not sure if it works yet or not, to be honest.
  • “Let Us Now Trash Famous Authors” by Christina Davidson is an article/web piece from The Atlantic might be useful for 621 in talking about why it is really important to be careful about how we work with “subjects” (e.g., “people”) in our research.  Davidson goes back to the town of Moundville, Alabama and retraces some of the history of James Agee’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, which is about sharecroppers during the depression and which is also famous for having some iconic depression era photos by Walker Evans.  Well, when Davidson tries to talk to some people about it all, the only ones she (apparently) can find who know the book feel like it exploited and humiliated the families.  Which I think just goes to show you that we always have to kind of careful about what we think will be “harmless” research or writing.
  • “No Ink, No Paper: What’s the Value of an E-Book?” is an NPR story that argues, basically, that publishers ought to move aggressively to e-books and take their substantial losses now instead of waiting for the inevitable.  Interesting points.
  • Chicken chicken chicken, which figures very briefly into my CCCC 2010 talk.
  • “Thank Sex for Making the Internet Hot.” I have always said that when it comes to figuring out what advances in technology matter, look at porn.  As I understand it, when man figured out how to fire clay into things, the first things they made were not pots for holding stuff but sex toys.  I might be wrong about that.  Anyway, this is an NPR story in which an actual technology historian talks about how sex paved the way for many new technologies, with a fair amount of focus on the internet.
  • “The Posting Hour” is about insomniacs and forums like Facebook.  Kinda interesting, I guess.
  • And finally (for now), there’s the Google Apps Marketplace, which looks to be a sort of “App Store” for things Googley.  I haven’t played with it much yet so I don’t know how useful it might or might not be, but it was an open tab, so there you have it.
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Three things that occur to me today about Lessig’s talk Thursday night

I went to the “wireside chat” Lawrence Lessig gave Thursday night, a talk mostly (but not entirely, as I’ll mention in a moment) about issues of copyright and remix on the ‘net. You can watch it all yourself now by going to this site; I certainly think it’s a worthwhile viewing experience, especially if you haven’t ever seen Lessig speaking and thinking about copyright and remix.

Three somewhat related thoughts about it all:

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As the happy academic, I contemplate the profession’s journey to hell in a handbasket. Or not.

I’ve been working all day trying to figure out what my classes for the winter term (which starts tomorrow) are going to look like.  I was going to write “working my ass off,” but let’s face it:  working in academia isn’t exactly manual labor, a point I’ll return to in a moment.  It involves a lot of sitting, a lot of thinking, a lot of reading online and on the page.  It’s fun.  Hitting the gym and eating right to reduce the size of previously mentioned ass– now that’s work.

Anyway, earlier today via Facebook and Twitter, I came across this CHE article by Thomas “not his real name” Benton, “Graduate School in the Humanities: Just Don’t Go.” It’s an article about why getting a PhD in “the humanities” in general is a bad idea, and it comes on the heels of a number of articles about how dreadful the job market is for academics at the MLA and, as this piece in Inside Higher Ed suggests, fields like history and economics as well.  I agree with at least two things in Benton’s article:

  • A lot of potential graduate students in his and my generation received bad advice.  “Having heard rumors about unemployed Ph.D.’s, some undergraduates would ask about job prospects in academe, only to be told, “There are always jobs for good people.” If the students happened to notice the increasing numbers of well-published, highly credentialed adjuncts teaching part time with no benefits, they would be told, “Don’t worry, massive retirements are coming soon, and then there will be plenty of positions available.” The encouragement they received from mostly well-meaning but ill-informed professors was bolstered by the message in our culture that education always leads to opportunity.”  I think that’s spot-on, and it makes me glad that my entry into graduate work in the late 198os was in an MFA program– not that that was a great career move, but the stakes were a lot lower than a PhD, and it was useful in lots of other ways.
  • Getting a job as a professor– particularly a humanities/literature professor– is not as easy as getting the degree, and getting the degree isn’t that easy either.  “They don’t know that you probably will have to accept living almost anywhere, and that you must also go through a six-year probationary period at the end of which you may be fired for any number of reasons and find yourself exiled from the profession. They seem to think becoming a humanities professor is a reliable prospect — a more responsible and secure choice than, say, attempting to make it as a freelance writer, or an actor, or a professional athlete — and, as a result, they don’t make any fallback plans until it is too late.”  Also very true, and I like the comparison of being a professor to these other less than “sure thing” professions.  You want a “sure thing” at a job where you can make good money, live almost anywhere, work on your schedule (within reason), and help people?  Be a nurse.

But as I skimmed and reskimmed the article during my day, while I was putting together the previously mentioned syllabi for English 328 and English 516, I got to thinking a bit more.

Continue reading “As the happy academic, I contemplate the profession’s journey to hell in a handbasket. Or not.”

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“Another one bites the dust” makes me think I should revise an old presentation

I came across this last week but didn’t have time to post a link or anything: “Another One Bites the Dust” is an Inside Higher Ed story about an international effort at online education closing up its “doors,” so to speak:

Of all the projects to build international online universities, U21 Global might have been the most ambitious. Universitas 21, the international consortium of highly reputed research universities that opened U21 Global in 2001, predicted the program would enroll 500,000 students and be netting $325 million annually by 2011.

But the program has been fraught with financial losses over its eight-year run, and currently enrolls only 5,000 students. A number of affiliated universities have walked away, including four in the last two years.

Basically, the article explains how this is another example of these online programs, which frankly seem primarily designed to make universities and investors a lot of money as opposed to provide quality education, failing. There are a bunch of others that have either failed entirely or which have not done well. In fact, with the exception of the University of Phoenix and Kaplan and a couple of other programs like it, I think it’s fair to say that online programs are successful– both in terms of extending opportunity to students and making money– when they are tied to “real” and previously existing colleges and universities. I’d wager that places like Phoenix and Kaplan make most of its money from people who need “just in time” education for their current job or to move into a slightly better one– an accounting course, something on how to make a web site, etc. I would bet that the number of students they have that look like EMU students, both traditional and non-traditional, are minimal.

This all reminds me of a presentation I gave almost 10 years ago now at an Midwest MLA called “Haven’t we said this before? What the History of Correspondence Courses Teach Us About the Promises and Problems of Online Distance Education Courses.” Basically, I sum up some of what David Noble wrote about in his article “Digital Diploma Mills: The Automation of Higher Education” and in his book called Digital Diploma Mills and his comparison online teaching to correspondence school programs of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.  I managed in that process to actually get a hold of a thesis a guy did at U of M in 1938 about correspondence schools and some other research on distance education of the time.  True, the comparisons that Noble makes between now and then are relevant in that the hype was similar:  back then, the postal service was going to make the brick and mortar universities irrelevant.  Much in the same way that failed to happen, the idea that online universities are going to replace places like EMU is pretty far-fetched.

But the comparison that Noble doesn’t follow through on that my (admittedly limited) research did suggest was that correspondence courses and “hybrid” courses (ones that were taught primarily by mail but that also did meet face to face a few times a term) did play a role in the educational experience for lots of people back then, in Michigan in particular.  In other words, correspondence courses really were a bit like online courses now:  they aren’t a replacement to the university experience, but they can certainly be a part of the mix.

It’d be interesting to revisit that presentation at this stage.  For one thing, the research process took me into a lot of cool places at U of M– a special collection of institutional documents, the book storage facilities, etc.  For another, now that I’ve been teaching online a lot for the last couple of years, I think I have a little more to stay on the practice.

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If I write it down, maybe it will become true

In the wishful thinking department:  I spent some time this afternoon making an unusual (for me) long and detailed “to do” list of everything I need to do before the end of the winter term, at least everything I could think of  at the time.  It’s two and half pages long.

But if– IF!– if I can get through this list before December 19, I will actually have something that resembles a “break” (maybe even a “vacation?”) between this term and the next.

Wish me luck.