- Steve B. and I drove into Detroit City late Thursday afternoon. We arrived at the registration table at about 4:50. Some person there said “Sorry, we close registration at 5.” Um, okay….
- Went to the St. Martin’s sponsored reception at the Detroit Beer Co., which was a nice way to kick stuff off. Good beer, good company. Showed Bob Whipple a bit about Comic Life, chatted with all kinds of folks.
- Steve B. and I were going to go out for Greek food, but pooped out and ended up at an Ypsilanti institution and EMU hang-out, the Sidetrack. Ah, the pleasures of the familiar.
- Friday AM, I moseyed in around 10:30 or so. Met up with a former MA student of ours who is now at the PhD program at BGSU. She interviewed me about blogging for a project she’s working on, which sounds pretty interesting.
- Went to the lunch event, ate with my colleague Nancy Allen (who has been on sabbatical this year, so it was good to catch up a bit) and managed to be close enough to the front to actually hear it. No microphone. But some interesting talks from Metroblogging Detroit, dETROITfUNK, and DetroitYES, bloggers from three very different area blogs/communities. I talked with them a bit afterwards about contacting them later as case study sources, and they all seemed pretty okay with that.
- Went to an excellent panel, Blogologies with Collin Brooke, Krista Kennedy, Derek Mueller, Donna Strickland, and Jeff Ward. Review forthcoming, but some useful stuff for this quasi-hypothetical book project. Oh, and there I was, right there, when Derek quoted from my “When Blogging Goes Bad” article. That’s the first time I was quoted right in front of me, which was kinda cool.
- Talked a bit with Collin and contemplated buying a Wayne State cap. I went into the store and didn’t like the selection, though I did like the sweatshirts they had indicated the major of “Undeclared.”
- The damn Starbucks was closed so no decent afternoon coffee.
- For reason too convoluted to go into here, I ended up missing Geoffrey Sirc’s speech because I was eating a lovely ruben and drinking fine beer in a place called Saloon Circa 1890. About 10 minutes after Sirc’s presentation was over, the place was full of C&W folks. At least one photo forthcoming. Talked with many other folks like Nick Carbone and previously mentioned folks, and heard tales from Mike Palmquist of his elaborate motorcycle travel from Colorado State U to here.
- Drove home without incident (which, knock on wood, has been the case so far in my travels into Detroit) and hung out with the wife and child. All in all, a good day indeed.
"Code and Composition"
From ACM Ubiquity comes “Code and Composition,” by Luke Fernandez of Weber State University. I haven’t read it yet, but I like the abstract/blurb info:
“Luke Fernandez’s “Code and Composition” compares the activity of programming computers with the activity of writing. The essay delineates the commonalities and differences in these activities in the context of larger technical and literary divisions that exist within the university.”
C&W 07: That's one way to promote your presentation…
C&W 2007: A Home Game, Sort Of
Besides all of this pesky teaching that I have to do this spring, I’ve been busy getting ready for this year’s Computers and Writing Conference. C&W is by far my favorite academic conference, but I don’t always go to it; in fact, I haven’t gone for the last couple of years. Two years ago, C&W was at Stanford, which would have been really nice (and I heard it was), but since the CCCCs was in San Francisco that year, it was out of my budget to go out there twice. Last year, C&W was in Lubbock, and while I again hear it was a great conference, my gut reaction was “Why in the heck would I want to go to Lubbock?”
This year, C&W is at Wayne State University in Detroit. That’s about 42 minutes from where I live and work, more or less (I live about a mile from EMU’s campus). So in that sense, it’s basically a local conference: I’m going to be commuting, arriving when I can and returning home to my own comfy bed and house each night. I have some working knowledge of the Detroit area (see below), and it will be nice to go to a conference and not spend a ton of money. Well, outside of the gas I’ll put in my car.
On the other hand, this might end up being kind of a pain in the butt. Those 42 minutes there and back assume no traffic problems, not an easy assumption between here and Detroit. I may very well regret not arranging for some sort of hotel or dorm stay for at least part of the conference. Also, even though I do live in the greater “metro Detroit” area, I can count on two hands (well, maybe 3) the number of times I’ve been east of about Dearborn in the nine years I’ve lived here. We’ve seen some plays and other performances in Detroit, there’s a great used book store downtown called John King Books I’ve been to a couple times, I’ve been to the Detroit Institute of Art, the Detroit Science Center, once to the Eastern Market, and we’ve been to Greektown two or three times. That’s pretty much it.
Typically, my wife and son and I get our various “services” in Ann Arbor or outer Detroit suburbs. I have certainly not “hung out” in Detroit much; in fact, our journeys into Detroit have always been very mission-specific.
I am quite sure that there are many in the C&W community who have the same reaction to Detroit that I had to Lubbock. In my above mentioned and fairly limited experience with Detroit, I think its reputation is both unfair and accurate. It’s “unfair” in that Detroit is not without some of the previously mentioned charms, and the area around Wayne State University is relatively safe. It certainly isn’t one of the more dangerous neighborhoods in Detroit. On the other hand, there really are a lot of burned-out and depressing looking buildings in Detroit, a lot of scary places, a lot of poverty, a lot of dirt and grime, etc., and it doesn’t have the sort of vibrant downtown culture of Chicago or New York.
Though I say all of this with limited knowledge of downtown Detroit, knowledge I’ll expand this week.
BTW, if anyone in the C&W world reading this is interested in an Ann Arbor side-trip and wants some ideas and advice, let me know and I’ll point you in the right direction if I don’t actually accompany you.
Visuals and Networks
A couple of other good projects to link to that came out yesterday (I mean besides my grand textbook unveiling, of course):
- viz., from the Computer Writing and Research Lab at the University of Texas at Austin. Basically, it’s a resource on visual rhetoric that has some potential.
- Rhetworks, which is Collin Brooke’s site about his ongoing book project on social networks. What interests me about this is it makes me think about Blogs as Writerly Spaces. Do I want a “new space” or just a category here? I am leaning toward category right now, but….
Some small-town computing
These articles are both largely dated in terms of both content and point– computers come to the K-12 classroom, there are doubters, there are enthusiasts, there are wonders about how to measure success of computers, there are wonders about access for all, etc.– but I’m linking to them for 516 anyway. For one thing, it sort of proves to me that the questions that were out there about using computers in classrooms about 10 years ago remain. For another, both of them talk a bit about chalkboards, which have a soft-spot for me too.
“Classroom revolution from blackboards to computer screens,” from SouthCoastToday.com, a Massachusetts publication.
“Computers for Everyone,” from the Sioux City (IA) Journal web site.
"Ditching" Microsoft Apps
Via cyberdash, I came across this article in InformationWeek online, “FAA May Ditch Microsoft’s Windows Vista And Office For Google And Linux Combo.” Here are the opening two paragraphs:
March is coming in like a lion for Microsoft’s public sector business. Days after InformationWeek reported that the Department of Transportation has placed a moratorium on upgrades to Windows Vista, Office 2007, and Internet Explorer 7, the top technology official at the Federal Aviation Administration revealed that he is considering a permanent ban on the Microsoft software in favor of a combination of Google’s new online business applications running on Linux-based hardware.
In an interview, FAA chief information officer David Bowen said he’s taking a close look at the Premier Edition of Google Apps as he mulls replacements for the agency’s Windows XP-based desktop computers and laptops. Bowen cited several reasons why he finds Google Apps attractive. “It’s a different sort of computing strategy,” he said. “It takes the desktop out of the way so you’re running a very thin client. From a security and management standpoint that would have some advantages.”
A bit of a poke into Google shows me that the same stuff is available to educational enterprises like this one for free, and the “premier” package is $50 a year.
I’m not familiar enough with these apps at this point to say if Google truly is ready to start charging $50 a year for what you get now, but I’ve been pretty pleased with gmail. I’ve started making the grand switch over, forwarding both of my personal and my school account to gmail, and the advantages of the interface outweigh the disadvantages so far.
The three things I like most about gmail at this point? First, the spam filter is dramatically more effective than what I had through my ISP, through EMU, and through Apple’s mail software. Second, the way that gmail sorts mail into “conversations” has turned out to be pretty handy. It’s taken some getting used to for me because you do have to dig into it a little bit to see what’s going on in a particular conversation, but the advantage is it keeps my inbox more compressed. And third, archiving everything with the ability to search through it easily means I don’t feel as compelled to sort every last email I get into a mailbox. I do label stuff that’s important still and I use that (basically) as a mailbox scheme, but just last night I found some message that I thought was long LONG gone just by sifting through a search. So that’s all been pretty cool.
So who knows? Maybe I’ll ditch MS Word next. I’ve already been playing around with iWork….
Of course, as far as Internet-based word processor or spreadsheet apps go, the disadvantage of having to be online to work with them are pretty obvious– perhaps not a big deal if you are working for the FAA and sitting at a desk all the time, but a bigger deal if you are a student or a teacher with a laptop who may or may not have decent wireless access at different points of the work day.
The 14 point period trick
Paper Tip/Trick – Click Here for more great videos and pictures!
This falls into the category of “those clever cheaters!” And actually, it’s also one of the reasons why, in the classes I teach, I tend to specify word counts rather than page length.
An early report about "Internet"
A blast from the past– the late 1980s or so? I’m not sure. Two curious things about this piece include a reference to an early (well, in Internet terms) censorship case in Canada where some material on an ongoing trial that wasn’t supposed to be released to the public was on Internet, and, more noticeably, that there’s no article here– that is, it’s “Internet” and not “The Internet,” and certainly not “the internet.”
Wanna buy some dangerous books?
Check out The Forbidden Library, which is a list of commonly banned books. Something I stumbled by via StumbleUpon, which is a fun way potentially waste time.
Oh, PS (also a “StumbleUpon” find): once you find something you think you want to read, banned or not, why not ask “What should I read next?” for web sites about that book. Kinda cool.