Power Moby-Dick

Okay, one more post from Johndan (who said he got it from someplace else) and then I gotta get to work: Power Moby-Dick, which is a heavily annotated version of the book, one that I was assigned to read in two different classes in graduate school and one I have yet to open. Yes, I was and remain a bad person. But perhaps this will be all I need to get the motivation to give that book a try. Besides showing this to my American Lit colleagues, this might be fun to look at in 516 or 444.

“Working through screens” site

Also on the possible 505 reading list for Fall 2009: via Johndan’s blog, I came across Working Through Screens, which is a site/book/set of flashcards put together by some kind of online design firm out west called Flashbulb Interaction. It might be cool, it might not be; it’s something that I’ll have to take a look at later. But right now, I need to read some of the readings for tonight on interaction and usability, a unit where this stuff would probably fit next year.

Fire: The next sharp stick?

I don’t mean to be on a John Hodgman kick as of late (though I am thinking I need to go and buy a book of his soon), but while looking for something else, I came across this old Hodgman piece at McSweeney’s, “Fire: The Next Sharp Stick?” For English 505 next year, I think I’m going to include all or some of Foucault’s lecture “The Discourse on Language” because this is where he talks about how before Mendel’s breakthroughs in plant genetics, to speak of traits being passed down from plant to plant was crazy; after Mendel, it was crazy to do any different. Or something to that effect.

In any event, Hodgman’s “Fire: The Next Sharp Stick?” could be an interesting and amusing counter-balance to that more complex work that oddly says about the same thing.

“The Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Media Literacy Education”

Via the NCTE Inbox comes “The Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Media Literacy Education,” which is a resource published on the Center for Social Media at American University. This includes a long article and this six or so minute movie:

The timing of this is good for me because these are topics that are coming up right now in English 328 as my students work on short collaborative movies and as I think about English 516 for the winter term. And there seems to be some good stuff at this AU center. For example, another resource to look at when I get a free minute: Recut, Reframe, Recycle: Quoting Copyrighted Material in User-Generated Video. This one seems to be particularly about mashups and remixes and how they “could” be legal under certain circumstances.

Of course, the timing on this is also bad since I have no time right now. All I can do yet this morning with these things is post some links. I have a mid-semester “to-do” list that could choke a horse….

It is taking me longer than I thought to do virtually anything this term

Last year, I was on quasi-sabbatical, meaning that between my administrative release and my research release, I taught one class the entire year. The year before that, I was doing two administrative jobs at once, which meant I taught a whole lot less. And before that, I had been receiving one kind of release or another for administrative this or that.

So this is the first term in a long time since I’ve taught a full load, and also the first time in a long time where I’ve taught all of my classes on campus. And, just to add to the adventure, the graduate course I am teaching is new for me, and, because it’s a theory course called “the rhetoric of science and technology,” it involves a BOATLOAD of new reading. AND I’ve added/modified English 328 (the class I teach all the time) to include a collaborative video project. I have no idea how this is going to translate into the online version of this class.

Anyway, I’m not complaining exactly because I know lots of academics– especially at regional/undergrad-oriented institutions like EMU– teach a 3-3 load along with doing a lot of stuff I don’t have to do, my classes are quite small (I have fewer students in these three different classes than some of my literature colleagues have in one of their three sections), and, as always the case with academic jobs, it’s better than shoveling coal. But it does make me think of a couple of things.

First, I have yet to get my “grading mojo” back. The worst part of the job is reading, commenting on, and grading student essay projects. I don’t say that as a slam to my students at all; they do good things, they’re trying hard, etc., etc. I’m not going to lie and say that they all do really interesting and great work, but enough of them do that I can honestly say that the problem here really isn’t them. I think the problem is it’s just kind of hard work to do that can sometimes be boring and often can be easy to put off. Grading is certainly a lot less “fun” than actually being in class (or online, for that matter) and “teaching,” or planning a class, or just talking with students.

So, the first couple of batches of essays for student projects have just taken me way WAY too long to comment on. It vaguely reminds me of when I started teaching 20 years ago, or, much more recently, when I mentored a bunch of new grad students through their first semester of first year writing here at EMU when I was the temp WPA for a year: I used to (and my recent grad students used to) spend just HOURS on these things, mainly because I didn’t quite know what I was doing in the broadest possible sense. This is what I mean by my “grading mojo:” I am not back to the place where I can sit down with a batch of student projects and give them decent/useful feedback in a reasonable amount of time.

Second, I am reminded once again of how much of the job of being a professor has almost nothing to do with teaching, and that includes people (like me right now) who are teaching “full loads” with no release time to do anything else. This state of affairs has been obvious to me for a long time I suppose, but I do remember how when I started down the tenure-track at Southern Oregon 12 years ago that I was quite surprised by this. I suppose also that I am in the stage of my career where I could blow off a lot of this stuff and become one of those “dead wood” professors, but retirement is still about 25 years off for me and I’ve seen the sort of bad things/bitterness that can happen with senior folks who take the easy road and opt-out of the operations/politics of a department.

And third, I’m not sure which is the better lot in faculty life, the position I was in recently of teaching two and getting a course release to attend to a fair amount of administrative things, or teaching three, doing a few non-teaching things here and there, and largely staying out of the administrative heavy-lifting. There are some quasi-administrative things coming up that I can imagine wanting to do and/or being told that I really need to do, so we’ll see how that works out.

But if I start talking about becoming a full-time administrator, you know that a) I really want the money, and/or b) I’ve gone off the deep end.

A bunch of links I came across yesterday

These are things I was going to link to yesterday, but I went to bed instead. So here they are now:

  • “Typewriter stays relevant in technology-saturated world,” from the LA Times. It’s about a family-run typewriter repair business and it claims that the typewriter is making a resurgence. I don’t know; I hear the argument that computers are a distraction if someone wants to “just write,” but you’d have to peel my computer from my cold, dead hands. I could see this being useful for either 328 or 516.
  • Laptop stand made from a coat hanger. I don’t think this would work that well for me because my Apple laptop doesn’t open flat like the laptop in this design, but it’s still something that’d be worth playing around with for an afternoon.
  • “I think I’m musing my mind,” which is a column from Roger Ebert where he writes about what losing the ability to speak has meant to him for his writing. Kind of an interesting piece, maybe the sort of thing that might be interesting in 328.
  • “Undecided,” by David Sedaris in the current issue of The New Yorker makes me wonder even more about that all-important group of voters and about his voting as a child. Funny stuff.
  • “3 Ways Web-Based Computing Will Change Colleges” from IHE, which is basically about the power of apps like Google Docs for sharing stuff and changing the way that IT works. I think it’s interesting, but there are two big problems. The article addresses one, which is privacy. The other one is that these apps are not quite ready for prime-time for me. Though the sharing part is pretty darn handy, I would agree.
  • Finally, this is something I came across this morning: Jenny Edbauer Rice’s tutorial for iMovie, which is something I might very well use in the next week or so for English 328. A handy start for my student’s future video projects.

Google research versus the index shuffle

There’s an article on eSchool News (which I found via NCTE inbox) that might serve as a nice counterweight to the Nick Carr article “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” called “Rethinking research in the Google era.” eSchool News site has a kind of annoying login procedure. But beyond that, it’s still a worthwhile article that more or less draws the same conclusion that both I and my students drew from the Carr article: skimming stuff on the web is not mutually exclusive from reading deeply, and we’ve been doing this skimming kind of thing for a long time.

I thought this quote summed up the article, more or less:

Jim Bosco, professor emeritus at Western Michigan University, says there has “always been the concern that with new technology comes hell. It began with Socrates being concerned that writing had a horrible effect on learning, because up until that point all learning was done through oral tradition. It’s continued with printing and then television. It’s a reoccurring trend throughout history.”

Though he admits there’s some truth to the idea that with newer traditions, something is lost from the old traditions, “that’s just the way progress works,” he said.

Bosco also agrees that scanning and skimming are nothing new for students.

“If people think it’s only the students now, [who] have access to the internet, who skim over information and write papers that are just a collage of quotes and material pulled from other articles, they’re wrong,” he said. “As a teacher who’s old enough to have reviewed papers both before and after the internet, let me tell you: Students in the past used to write papers in the same way. There will always be students who write papers where it’s obvious they have no deep understanding of the material. It’s not a new phenomenon–it’s just better automated now.”

In reading this– especially those last two sentences– I am reminded of a particular time in my undergraduate experience, an infamous gen ed class I took with my friend Chris W. that was basically about the history European nationalism and which was taught by a guy who was apparently known as one of the “TA Emeritus” since he had been doing that bit for so long.

I remember at least one paper I wrote for that class that was based entirely on what I referred to as the “index shuffle.” I looked at the index, picked a listing that seemed both interesting and plentiful with answers, read those pages (and the ones around it), and wrote an essay. I believe I ended up with a B on that paper and also in that class.

TA Emeritus overheard Chris and I discussing this strategy one day late in the term, after we had all gotten to known each other a bit, and we chatted about it one day after class. TA Emeritus said to me “At first Steve, I was disappointed that you had not completed all of the reading. But then I realized that you had learned and masted a valuable college survival skill.” So the way I look at it, I might not have learned directly a lot about European nationalism, I did learn more about writing, even if what I learned was kind of a bad/shortcut strategy along the lines of Google and/or Wikipedia research.

Of course, for the next project in that class, one that involved writing about a book that did not include an index, I was screwed.

Wanted: Assistant Professor, Computers and Writing, EMU

Or, as I was going to title this post, “jobs away!”

Since we now have an honest-to-goodness number for this position and are placing ads, I feel like I can officially announce that we’re searching for an assistant professor in computers and writing. Here’s what the ad will look like:

Assistant Professor, Computers and Writing

Tenure-track position in composition and rhetoric with an emphasis in computers and writing beginning in Fall 2009. We are seeking a colleague who values teaching, research, and service, and who is interested in joining a dynamic department which includes an active group of composition and rhetoric faculty in a nationally recognized writing program. Expertise in some combination of the following: new media writing, web 2.0 writing technologies, online and computer-mediated pedagogy, technical writing, digital rhetorics, and visual rhetorics. Candidates must complete PhD by Fall 2009. Submit a letter of interest, a CV, and a statement of teaching philosophy by November 1, 2008, attention Dr. Steven D. Krause, Department of English Language and Literature, 612 Pray-Harrold Hall, Eastern Michigan University, Ypsilanti, MI 48197.

I think this is going to be a fun search for us and a good gig for whoever we end up hiring. As I said in the email post I sent to a couple of the usual mailing lists, EMU is a great place to work. We’re a large, friendly, and diverse department, and I have fantastic writing program colleagues. This is not the kind of position where you would be one of two or three comp/rhet folks to do everything.

And geographically, I think we’re hard to beat: easy driving distance to Detroit and all of its “big city” pleasures, and practically walking distance (well, I exaggerate a bit) to the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and all of the various things that one can enjoy in a quintessential “college town.” This might be a kind of shallow example, but when contemplating a move to another institution in recent years, my wife and I have asked each other “yes, but is there a Whole Foods nearby?” Well, a second Food (W)hole opens in Ann Arbor next week.

But in all seriousness: this is a good gig. And I speak from experience at having a previous academic job that was, um, not.

Anyway, that’s probably all I’ll be posting here about this until we hire someone. If you’re interested in learning more and/or you’ve got some grad students who might want to know more, send me an email at skrause at emich dot edu

Badly behaving debaters

Via my google read, I came across this Chronicle of Higher Ed article, “Debate Coach Fired and Team Suspended After Mooning.” Here are the first couple paragraphs of the article:

Fort Hays State University fired a professor and debate coach on Friday, just weeks after video surfaced on YouTube of his dropping his shorts in front of judges at a national tournament. The university also suspended its debate team, one of the best in the country, over concerns that the collegiate-debate circuit had become too uncivilized.

The coach, William Shanahan III, a professor of communication, got into a shouting match with a judge—and at one point briefly dropped his shorts and exposed his underwear—during the national tournament this past spring of the Cross Examination Debate Association.

The New York Times had a similar article. And here’s a pretty good commentary on the piece, “No ifs, ands, butts about civil debate.”

Curiously, both articles lack a couple of key links. First, there is the video– yes, actual video at the debate– of the event in question:

There are a variety of different remixes and such on YouTube too. It wasted my morning, I can tell you that.

The actual mooning event happens quickly (I didn’t see it the first time through) and at about the 36-37 second mark. Though the video goes on for quite a while after that. I watched about three minutes and then scanned through the rest. To be honest, I can’t really tell what the argument/fight here is about– I am guessing a disagreement about a decision. One article I read said it happened after the quarter final round. Note that the screaming match involves people saying “fuck” quite a bit.

And it turns out that Professor Shanahan has a blog, though he hasn’t updated it since June.

To me, it looks like these folks have just gone kind of nuts, cracking under the pressure of a big tournament, and– this is just a guess– sleep deprivation. These late tournament rounds often don’t begin until well into the evening after a full day of competition. And you have to remember that debate at this level is as much of a competitive and intense an event as the game to play into the “final four” at the NCAA basketball tournament. When I was in high school and college debate 20+ years ago, I saw plenty of arguments where an occasional “f bomb” was thrown. So in the broad sense, I don’t think the idea of a near brawl breaking out is that weird.

Still, just as you don’t routinely see basketball coaches throwing chairs across the court, you don’t usually see arguing coaches/debaters dropping their pants, if even briefly.

I also think this video is ample evidence of something that every academic already knows: just because you are a professor and you have a PhD doesn’t mean you are above behaving badly.

Krause vs. CCCCs: 0-3-1

I just got the notice that neither of the proposals I was a part of was accepted at the 2009 CCCCs in San Francisco. Frankly, I’m kind of surprised because I was riding shotgun (and/or in the backseat) of a couple of different things that I thought were pretty good. One was a pre-conference workshop with Dennis Jerz, Sharon Gerald, and some other folks I don’t remember now that would have been a workshop on easy uses of free and open-source tools in first year writing classes. The second was a panel organized by Joanna Howard and it would have featured Joanna, me, Matt Barton, and Nick Carbone discussing some of the pros and cons of alternatives to the traditional textbook industry– e.g., the wikibook comp/rhet book that Matt has worked on, my The Process of Research Writing, etc.

I thought the workshop might be tricky because I’ve only been able to pull off one of those in my attempts at the CCCCs and there is always a space issue/lack of technology issue. But I thought the panel on publishing was a shoe-in shoo-in. I mean, a panel about textbook publishing, about multimedia, one that features speakers from very different kinds of schools/occupations from all over the country? What’s not to like?

On the one hand, it’s not that big of a deal for me. It’s not like I need this on my CV, and I had been mulling over in my own mind the choices/opportunities of going to the CCCCs versus going to C&W at UC Davis in late June. My meager travel (and personal) budget can afford only one trip to California this year, and while I think I would have preferred the CCCCs because I didn’t go last year and because it still is the main conference in the field, I think computers and writing is a much more fun conference. Perhaps the fam and I will find a way to make this into a visit to Ashland, OR too.

On the other hand, I am at a bit of a loss at my recent CCCCs proposal record. Between 1995 and 2007, I presented at the CCCCs eight times, was on the program for a couple different special interest groups, and was a part of one workshop. In that time, I think I had a proposal rejected once– maybe twice– and I just decided not to go to the CCCCs that was in Minneapolis (I can’t remember why now). But since 2007, my batting average has been poor to say the least. Two rejections this year, one rejection for 2008 (which was a strange one because I didn’t get the final word until well into October), and one initial rejection but then an acceptance after I appealed (I ended up giving my presentation to an audience of 3, one of whom was, if I recall, Dennis Jerz).

All I can figure is that it’s a combination of bad luck and different emphasis at the CCCCs the last few years. My CCCCs proposal for 2008 was about my on-going research on blogs, and it was rejected; I proposed something pretty darn similar for C&W in Athens, it was accepted, and it was a very well-attended panel. It’s not that the CCCCs hasn’t excluded “technology things” from its program as of late, but it would appear that in the last couple of years, they aren’t that interested in the stuff I’m proposing. For whatever reason.

Oh well, there you have it. If there are any other CCCCs losers out there who want to share their stories, feel free. Or the winners too, you bastards.

By the way, if you are curious to see who did get accepted, check out the CCCC searchable program here.