Academia – Page 22 – Steven D. Krause

March 21, 2010March 21, 2010

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.

Continue reading “Krause’s #CCCC10 Recap”

March 13, 2010

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.

February 27, 2010February 27, 2010

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:

Continue reading “Three things that occur to me today about Lessig’s talk Thursday night”

January 5, 2010January 6, 2010

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.”

December 13, 2009

“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.

December 1, 2009

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.

November 30, 2009

Where have all the blogs gone?

This is something I’ve been meaning to post about for a while now and that has come up in a couple of different places recently: is blogging, well, “over?”

No, but I do think it’s different than it was.

Continue reading “Where have all the blogs gone?”

November 24, 2009

Because I have a blog, I too get to chime in on Bérubé v. Dean Dad

There’s a bit of an intellectual food fight going on about every academic’s favorite workplace debate, the value (or lack thereof) of tenure. The short version is that Dean Dad at Confessions of a Community College Dean is against it, while Michael Bérubé at his blog (now called American Airspace, I guess?) is for it. Also in a very basic sense, Dean Dad and Bérubé are simply playing out the logical roles based on their place and status within the academy: that is, DD is an administrator and wants to get rid of tenure because of the “economic reality” that tenure is not sustainable, and Bérubé is a professor and wants to protect tenure for all kinds of reasons, both noble and self-serving. Since I too am a professor (not to mentioned a tenured one) and not a dean, I freely admit that I think Bérubé is right and DD is wrong. Basically.

Anyway, a few observations on their dispute and tenure before I get to grading and wrapping stuff up so we can get out of town for Thanksgiving:

There is a difference between a community college and a bachelor degree granting college or university, not to mention a university that grants graduate degrees. Not to take anything away from community colleges, but it takes greater skill sets and qualifications in your faculty to teach those advanced courses. At places like EMU, we graduate the kinds of students who DD turns around and hires to teach at his community college. So I think this is one of the reasons why DD’s take on this seems to be it’d be no big deal to just hire people on contract– and at a community college, it probably wouldn’t be a big deal. But you show me a university that grants graduate degrees that does not tenure its faculty and I’ll show you a graduate school that is difficult to take seriously.
Tenure and its definitions vary widely. Here at EMU, we hire people with the presumption that we’ll tenure them, and in my dozen years in the department, we’ve never not tenured someone. At that quaint liberal arts college in Ann Arbor, tenure is quite a bit more contentious and uncertain. Here at EMU, tenure and promotion is largely a union issue; at many (most?) other universities, it is frequently a mysterious, “behind closed doors” sort of affair. Also, while the numbers have moved around a bit, my guess is we have about as many faculty now at EMU as we did when the faculty organized, plus or minus 30 or so.
There’s a big difference between a “part-timer” (someone who is hired to teach on a semester to semester basis) and a “professor” on the tenure track, at least at a university. Our part-timers (and we have some great ones, btw) do zero service, advising, or any of the other work beyond teaching, and they have little investment in the long-term value of the institution. And why should they? We pay them a wage that is probably just north of what they could be making at Starbucks. In contrast, tenure-track faculty do lots of service and advising beyond teaching, and, because they’re tenured, they inherently have a long-term stake in the institution.
Which reminds me: given the amount of stuff faculty do that is beyond teaching and the amount of stuff we do that is described generally as “administrative creep,” it seems to me that DD ought to be careful what he wishes for. I mean, good luck getting your part-timers to participate in the bureaucracy of program review and accreditation!
I think the amount of “dead wood” among the ranks of the tenured is highly exaggerated. Sure, in my department of 40 or so tenured faculty, I can think of five or six who are kind of in that category. But most of those folks aren’t so much “dead wood” as they are “looking forward to retirement.” Most of my colleagues, even the ones who have been tenured for 30 or more years, are still quite active. They might not do much scholarship anymore, but they still teach a lot and do lots of service. And it ain’t the “dead wood” faculty who are causing troubles for administrators and everyone else.
DD keeps suggesting that the solution to the tenure problem is long term (say five years) and renewable contracts. I think he is either being naive or this is a red herring because, in practice, there is no real difference between a “long term contract” and “tenure.” I mean, does he have any idea how hard it is to not renew a contract and/or fire someone in any like of work? Especially from what is essentially a “government job?”We have lecturers at EMU who work on year to year contracts, and as far as I can tell, the only way we can “release” these folks is if they do something horribly wrong or if there is some horrible financial crisis. In a sense then, these folks might as well be “tenured.” And along these lines, tenured faculty can (and have been) fired for doing horrible things and as a result of horrible financial crisis within an institution. So….
… I don’t think that DD’s objections to the tenure system has anything to do with economics at all. The “Great Recession” has already forced cost-cutting measures at many universities, including pay cuts and increased teaching loads. No, at the risk of reading “too much into this,” I think DD is really objecting to:

Unions, specifically the AAUP, and

Particular tenured faculty who are pain in his ass.

I have some sympathy with both of DD’s problems– some, not a lot. EMU has a faculty union (the AAUP), and while I often feel like the union does some dumb stuff and can be rather shrill, I would much rather be in a union than not. And it is very true that some tenured faculty can be assholes, and tenure has the unfortunate side effect of reinforcing and even rewarding that behavior. But hey, all you have to do is read Dilbert to realize that dealing with workers who are a pain in the ass are just another part of the world.

Sorta like dealing with pointy-haired bosses/deans.

November 18, 2009

“Downloading Optimism” (and btw, what’s new with electronic books?)

I know that the image there is going to be too small to read, but go ahead and click on it to read it. This comes from Lucy Knisley who seems to be a bit of a Renaissance woman of sorts with comics, journal writings, illustrations, crafts, etc., etc.

Really REALLY smart stuff about a group of old school comics folks lamenting the falling of print, which was written and drawn by a comic artist who is obviously enthusiastic about digital books. As she points out, there was a point in the past where these codex book things were weird (where’s the scroll?), and of course there was a time where print itself was weird, too (why are all the letters so neat and orderly?), not to mention stuff like page numbers, etc. And, as she writes here, “I’d just rather not expend all my energy worrying over how my words are delivered, and instead concentrate on the quality and content of the words.” Exactly, and the problem with journalism and traditional publishers is that they keep thinking that they are in the bottle business instead of the wine business.

Anyway, this also jarred in me the question again about “e-readers” or electronic books or whatever you want to call them. Knisley talks in this comic about reading stuff on her iPod/iPhone, but I don’t know if I could/would be willing to do that. I don’t mind reading blogs or email or similarly “short” sort of things on my iPod, but I don’t know if I’d want to read a book-length work on my phone. Too little of a window for me.

The Kindle is still problematic for my own reading tastes, as far as I can tell. I don’t really like the way that the device is locked down/locked into amazon.com only content (remember that infamous 1984 issue?), it apparently doesn’t handle PDF files well, and it doesn’t allow for easy annotations. I’ve heard good things about Barnes and Noble’s Nook, but I’d certainly want to play around with it. For me, the ability to handle the PDFs from academic journals and the things I assign students to read in various classes. I don’t need one of these things to “just read” novels or magazines or whatever, which perhaps makes me a reader who is not in the marking plan for companies like amazon.com or B&N.

Anyway, must reading for 516 and/or 444, probably for 328 too.