Writer, Professor, and Everything Else
One of my students sent me a long list of cool web-based technologies to share with students for a project we’re doing in my “Writing for the World Wide Web” class. I’m too lazy to cut and paste that information here, but I’m certainly not too lazy to link to it.
So here’s the list of stuff I need to check out sooner than later. Most of these are news to me….
The dust of the CCCCs and the Jacobson Symposium is starting to clear (though I am late on a different writing project and then there’s that pesky teaching stuff I need to do until the end of the term), and pretty soon, I (along with my colleague Steve Benninghoff) will start setting up the writing program’s new server, writing.emich.edu.
Loyal readers may recall that I have reported here and here that I’ve had a series of problems with the EMU ICT folks regarding serving stuff that involves MySQL and PHP, which is basically any content management system you can think of. Long story short: I asked in September or so the powers that be regarding computer stuff on campus if I could run a CMS like WordPress and drupal on an EMU server. After receiving the run-around for about four months, the answer I received was “no,” and the reason I was given was “uh… security… yeah, security, that’s it.” After a bit more probing, the real answer emerged, which is basically a combination of “we don’t have the resources” and “we don’t want to.”
So, it became apparent that if we are going to do any of these things, we are going to have to do it ourselves, and I am happy to report that my department head, who thankfully understood the issues here, approved the purchase of a Mac Mini, which is chained to my desk and the home of writing.emich.edu.
Or future home. There’s not much there yet.
Frankly, I would prefer to not be in the server business, but if the people who are supposed to be doing this don’t have the will— er, “resources”– to do their job, I guess we’ll have to do it ourselves.
One more kind of funny because it’s sad kind of thing about this: when I was at Creighton for the Jacobson Symposium, some of the folks there thought it was interesting and strange that I was allowed to run a server out of my office. Personally, I found it interesting and strange that the tech area at Creighton, which they call DoIT, seems most interested in trying to provide faculty and students technologies and support to help them do their jobs. What a strange world….
I had a fantastic time Saturday at the Jacobson Symposium. I’ll post some info about what I said tomorrow or so, but I thought the other presenters were excellent and I feel like I came away with a lot of good ideas. I guess it just goes to show that they’re doing some great stuff with technology here at Creighton.
So, here’s a run-down of my notes, my impressions, and my miscellaneous observations:
After him, there was a presentation by Bridget Keegan and Matthew Low about using a blog in an introductory literary theory class. They have a web site up with much of their presentation notes on it. Again, a great talk, one where I think they do a good job of modeling some of the “best practices” in class blogs, including a lot of the common concerns and problems: flaming, FREPA issues and privacy, resistance to technology, etc., etc. Two things that I wrote down: I really like the way that they had students in this literature class work at coming up with the “best practices” for what a good blog post should look like, and I thought the list of attributes that they had at the end of the semester was interesting too. To me, it looked like a lot the initial group of practices focused on mechanics; later in the term, the practices seemed more about “good writing.” The second thing is that I think that Bridget captured one of the major problems of blogs in teaching: it’s supposed to be a “fun” activity, and she thought that her students were resistant to doing something that was supposed to be kind of fun in a class.
Last but not least here was a presentation by Gintaras Duda, who is a physics professor at Creighton. He gave a great talk about his experiences in using blogs to teach an introductory physics class. One of the things that Gintaras said was, according to past surveys at other institutions, students leave intro to physics courses with even worse attitudes about the class than before it began. So, in an effort to combat these “bad attitudes,” Gintaras set up a blog where he posted things in an effort to connect physics to the “real” world and invited his students to post to it. The incentive for students was the blog space was extra credit, which, in the context of this particular class (and also if you think about blogging as one of those things that ought to be kind of “fun” or at least voluntary) made a lot of sense.
Also– I guess maybe because of he is a scientist, after all– Gintaras talked about some of the statistical work he did comparing student attitudes about physics in his classes, where there were blogs, with sections of physics where students didn’t have blogs. In the classes with the blogs, students had better overall attitudes. Sure, no doubt that there are a lot of other factors here, but I for one really appreciate the fact that he’s making the effort to demonstrate some sort of statistical evidence for the value of blogs.
Like I said, really great stuff.
Of course, it’s taken me a couple days (off and on) to write this up since it’s been a pretty crazy getting back into the swing of things. And before I know it, it’ll all be over for the semester, too….
Check out WordPattrn.
Unless this is some kind of April Fool’s Joke, I can imagine that this will be the “next big thing,” as they say.
Update:
Geez, I’m a dope. And you know what? “Gullible” isn’t in the dictionary, either….
Via this week’s NCTE Inbox email comes this article, “And access for all: Schools try to connect unplugged students with the Internet” in South Florida’s Sun-Sentinel. Here’s one passage:
In an age of instant messaging, iPods, and Web journals, about 3 million teenagers nationwide — 13 percent — remain unplugged, according to a 2005 report released by the Pew Internet & American Life Project on Teens and Technology.
That 13 percent (on average– I’m sure that number is higher in some school districts, lower in others) of secondary school students don’t have regular access to computers strikes me as a glass “half -full,” especially when one considers relatively recent history. But I would agree it’s still a problem that access is not universal.
But the article also makes some other problematic claims about technology. At one point in it, a Miami school official describes technology as the “great equalizer.” Well, I dunno about that. I have plenty of students and colleagues who have fine computer access but less than stellar computer literacy….
In an effort to catch up on blog reading and procrastinate from the things I ought to really be doing, I offer this long list of useful (to me) links to readings/entries from blogs in my RSS feed published in the last week or so:
I think that’s it– heck, isn’t that enough?
I’ve spent far too much time since last Monday trying to figure out how to install drupal on my Macintosh computer in my office. I’m interested in working with some kind of CMS for departmental things– to make some documents easily available, maybe even to be the “front end” fo the writing program web site. Drupal seemed like it might be a good idea.
I of course realize that I could use Drupal for tons of other things, but I’m not interested in changing my ways too much. WordPress works just fine for me in terms of a blog (and, as I’ll get to in a moment, it might end up being my choice for a CMS too), and I plan on continuing to use some combination of ol’ fashion web sites and eCollege for my teaching. As I’ve said before, eCollege isn’t perfect, it isn’t nearly as customizable as any open source/do-it-yourself product, and I think the interface is kind of ugly. On the other hand, eCollege is the system supported by Continuing Ed at EMU (and it is quite well supported, too), which means that the technical stuff is someone else’s problem. And this last issue is way important.
Anyway, I found some instructions at a sight called Mac Zealots for installing drupal on a Mac. BTW, a great site, and, as far as I can tell, it’s written and run by a couple of undergrads at Purdue. Now, no fault to the Mac Zealot guys, I had two basic problems following these directions for drupal. First, I am a “Mac guy” specifically to avoid opening “Terminal” and typing a lot of crap like this:
/usr/local/mysql/bin/mysql test
Second, in order to install drupal (or any of these other open source content management systems), you really have to install and vaguely understand MySQL and PHP. This is a level of computer geekdom I have not yet reached.
Now, when I’ve raised some of these issues with people who know better than me, and their general response is “you should talk with your local system adminstrator.” Well, here’s the problem: when I mention things like “Content Management Systems” (and to be perfectly honest, even stuff like “Open Source”) to the local system adminstrator types, they clearly have no clue as to what I’m talking about. There is a way to work with MySQL on the university’s main web server, but I think they are very stingy about access to this and when you ask for access (which I have– haven’t heard back yet), they make it clear that you’re basically on your own.
In short, when it comes to this sort of thing (e.g., anything that ICT doesn’t already understand, even if it is something that they should understand), I am the local system administrator.
Anyway, I figured out the other day that I had installed the wrong version of MySQL before Thanksgiving break and didn’t really figure that out until yesterday. An easy mistake, IMO, because there are about 100 different versions of MySQL and the “right” version for things like drupal and WordPress is kind of old. So I had to go through the process of un-installing MySQL, a somewhat scary step since it again involved the dreaded Terminal function and the script I found for uninstalling MySQL comes with warnings like “make sure you know what you’re doing or you’ll have to reinstall everything on your computer.” And basically, I think that I did get this version of MySQL to work.
So, everything’s great? Not quite.
I tried to get drupal to run with no success. Then I tried to install WordPress, and, after a few minor glitches, I got it to run, as you can see here (though there really isn’t anything there yet). I would still like to get drupal to work, and maybe I’ll try to monkey around with it when I get a bit more free time in the office. But for the time-being, here’s what I’ve learned so far:
Interestingly enough, there is a software that does a lot of this stuff called iBlog. I haven’t used it, but the reviews are pretty mixed.
The Call for Proposals for the Computers and Writing Conference 2006 in Lubbock, TX is out. And of course, I’m looking forward to that.
But in other news, Computers and Writing 2007 is going to be a hop and a skip away in Detroit at Wayne State University. Here’s a link to the application, which also spells out some of the budget issues for this thing, something that might be useful for future proposer, too.
Congrats to Rice and crew!
I need to get myself caught up on grading today, so for now, just a few miscellaeous links to things from the blogosphere for the last couple of days:
Via what looks like a library-oriented blog called DigitalKoans comes this bibliography about Google and publishing. Nice– I always like it when someone does the work for me. In any event, as I think about Computers and Writing for the winter in the back of my mind, I am thinking more and more about how I really need to have a unit on Google or electronic publishing or maybe both or together.