EMU – Page 4 – Steven D. Krause

September 18, 2012

Searching for an Assistant Professor/Associate Director of the FYWP

I am pleased to announce that we are conducting two searches this year in the rhetoric and writing program, a search for a position in technical communication (that committee is being chaired by my colleague Derek Muller) and this search I’m chairing for an assistant professor who will serve as the associate director of the first year writing program. Here’s the official ad as it will appear soon in various places:

The Department of English Language and Literature invites applications for a tenure-track Assistant Professor in rhetoric and writing, beginning Fall 2013. We are seeking a colleague who values teaching, research, and service to serve as the Associate Director of the First-year Writing Program in the Department of English Language and Literature at Eastern Michigan University. The Associate WPA is a faculty position which includes partial release for administrative purposes. Candidates must hold a PhD in composition and rhetoric (or a related field) by August 2013. Scholarship and experience in writing program administration also required. The ideal candidate will also have expertise in online and technology-mediated pedagogy. Secondary interests might also include comparative rhetorics, language policies, cultural rhetorics, or disciplinary literacies.

Applicants should submit a cover letter, resume, a statement of teaching philosophy, and a statement of administrative philosophy. Visit https://www.emujobs.com/postings/11338

Review of applications will begin October 26, 2012 and continue until the position is filled.

For more information contact the Search Committee Chair Dr. Steven D. Krause, Search Committee Chair, 612 Pray-Harrold Hall, Eastern Michigan University, Ypsilanti, MI 48197.

If contacted, you will be asked to present official transcripts of your highest degree earned at the time of interview.

Let me offer a few other details about the place not in the ad:

EMU is a great place to work. English is a friendly and diverse department, and my colleagues in the writing program are fantastic. We have an undergraduate major with emphases in writing studies, technical communication, and professional writing, along with closely related programs in English education, journalism, and public relations. At the graduate level, our MA in written communications has emphases in professional writing and the teaching of writing. See:

http://www.emich.edu/english/writing

and

http://writing.emuenglish.org

Institutionally, faculty are represented by a union (we just signed a new contract, one of the better ones in my time here) which helps immensely in clarifying the process for things like tenure and promotion.

This colleague will work in a progressive and award-winning first year writing program. It has been an innovative program that developed the first “celebrations of student writing” events under the leadership of Linda Adler-Kassner and Heidi Estrem. The program continues its strong tradition with John Dunn in as the director and with Derek Muller as the current associate director. We have a great group of graduate assistants, part-time instructors, lecturers, and faculty teaching and supporting the program. See http://www.emich.edu/english/fywp/ for more information
We’re in a great location. Ypsilanti is about 35 miles west of Detroit and adjacent to Ann Arbor. In fact, EMU is less than seven miles from the University of Michigan, which means that we are lucky enough to enjoy much of what they have to offer– for example, access to their libraries and the many cultural and lifestyle options of the quintessential “college town.” Plus we are close enough to the “big city” to take advantage of what Detroit offers– a conveniently located international airport, world class museums and theater, sporting events, and so forth.

Feel free to contact me at skrause@emich.edu with any questions.

November 18, 2011November 18, 2011

Not much about “iPads” or “Learning” at yesterday’s “Workshop”

Yesterday afternoon, I went to an event sponsored by Apple Education Seminar thing featuring Apple-sponsored speakers and employees that was called an “iPad Learning Workshop.” I’m going to emphasize the positive aspects of it over on my slowly growing academiciPad site, but frankly, I thought it was pretty awful.

It began with an Apple-employed speaker/PR/marketing wonk whose talk was stuff anyone who had heard of the iPad would have been able to figure out and that was about it. “You can install apps! You can check your email! You can watch movies!” This and she showed not one but two short videos/commercials that were essentially animated text with Apple-like piano music and a few pictures of iPads. At some point, someone interrupted and asked what I think is a completely reasonable question: given that our students are coming to classes with laptops, what’s the point of an iPad? What is unique about the iPad? And you know what? She didn’t really have an answer to this question.

Really. Really?

This was followed by one of Apple’s teaching experts. He had some interesting things to say, but it was all about secondary school, not the target audience for this group even if most of the people there were in the College of Education. Most of what he had to talk about had nothing to do with iPads in particular but more about technology in secondary schools– and specifically, this guy talked about private and religious secondary school he works at in Holland, Michigan, a school which, judging from the pictures, is a completely different world from any public school in the area, not to mention EMU.

It was really striking. I left that thing thinking a) maybe there is an audience for my month (maybe longer) web site experiment about iPads, and b) I ought to try to go into the educational technology consulting business.

But the other take-away was about universal access. To the extent that the Apple marketer had anything interesting to say about iPads in teaching, it all assumed that students had these devices in their hands. The guy from the private school in Holland talked about the enormous initiative at his school to get laptops into the hands of all students and staff and to even remodel/rebuild the school building to provide spaces for folks to collaborate together with those laptops.

So it seems to me that the iPad initiative that I’m a part of this year is completely backwards in that we shouldn’t be giving these things to a few select faculty, but rather, we should be finding a way to get these things into the hands of as many students as possible. And I am reminded once again that the smartest thing that EMU could do is to push into the late 20th century and require all students to have a laptop computer that meets certain basic benchmarks in terms of processing, software, etc.

October 31, 2011

In honor of national novel writing month, a new blog (for a month or more)

I’ve been trying lately to follow my own advice to my students in English 621 by working on a project in small bits and pieces as time allows instead of doing what far too many of us do far too often, which is to think “oh, I’ll get to that when I can really spend a solid couple of days on it,” which translates to “never.” And I’ve been making decent enough progress on revisiting my dissertation to see if I can’t re-see/re-shape it into something for now. The basic premise of the complexities of rhetorical situation in the digital age are still true, and if nothing else, I’ve been enjoying going back to poke at something that I wrote a long time ago.

Anyway, while that “touch it every day” project is going well, I’ve decided to kind of put it on hold and/or let it compete for time with a new blogging project about iPads (and similar mobile devices) and academic work. I’m calling it Academic iPad.

Why, you ask? Well, three reasons, basically. First, while I have always been a bid admirer of National Novel Writing Month and the “just do it and stop over-thinking it” attitude behind that project, I really don’t have a novel in me right now, and November is anything but a “slow month” in terms of work stuff. So I thought I’d try something a little more modest, and I figure I can write a blog entry a day for a month.

Second, to the extent that people find this blog through a particular search for something (as opposed to those who read this blog once in a while because they might know me in “real life” or through my work at EMU or in computers and writing or whatever), it tends to be about iPad stuff and usually academic iPad stuff. I figured that perhaps that justifies a whole new space.

And third, I thought I should do something tangible for my participation in EMU’s mobile computing/eFellows initiative. There is a longer/insider story behind this that I’m not going to go into now, but last winter, I got involved in an initiative here where faculty were supposed to be doing things to learn more about incorporating mobile devices into their work. But other than getting an iPad from EMU (as a loaner, at least in theory), I haven’t done much of anything with all this. So I thought if nothing else, I could create a blog/web space that could serve as a place for resources and reflections on the role of iPads (and other “mobile computing” technologies) for academics.

So we’ll see how it goes. I make no promises that this continues beyond this month, which might also be a good thing, a blog/web site that has a definitive ending point.

September 22, 2011

The Office, the new season

Things have been quiet around the ol’ blog lately because the new fall term is upon us with a vengeance, mostly because of the move back into the the remodeled but not completely done/sorted out yet Pray-Harrold. Heck, it’s taken me a couple weeks just to write this little post!

If you were one of the three people who attended the panel I was on about “Pray-Harrold in Exile” in Atlanta at the CCCCs (or if you are one of the 100 or so people who saw this video on YouTube), or if you have read some of the posts and comments on EMUTalk.org about this, then you are aware that my department (and many others) were temporarily uprooted out of our previous office and teaching space, Pray-Harrold Hall, deposited in dorms and other odd places for about 16 months, and now reassembled in slightly different order back in our previous building.

It’s mostly good, with some bad and some frustrations thrown into the mix. The old building features a lot of new fixtures: new bathrooms; new flooring, walls, ceilings, lighting, windows, doors, and the like; new technology in the regular classrooms; and much better infrastructure in terms of the “guts” of the building, HVAC and electrical and the like. The bad part of it all is it’s still the same old and huge building, and a compelling argument could be made that we should have torn this thing down and started over. And there have been a ton of frustrations regarding little things like keys and pretty big things like not very good at all tech support and other problems.

But I don’t want to dwell on that. I just want to contemplate the office.

On the floor that hosts (most) of the Department of English Language and Literature, there are “interior” offices that are small-ish (10 X 12 or so, maybe a little less) and that lack a window, and “exterior” offices that are close to twice as big and that have a window. Now, in the pre-remodeling configuration of things, if as a faculty person in the department you wanted your own office, you got an interior one; if you were willing to share (usually with a part-timer or lecturer), you got an exterior one. This represented a certain balance in that there were obvious pros and cons to each choice.

For institutional/insider reasons not worth going into, this has changed. Now exterior offices go to faculty based on being a program coordinator (which was the case before as well) and based on seniority, interior offices go to less senior faculty and full-time lecturers, and part-time instructors are in a different building entirely. So, as the program coordinator for written communication, I get one of the larger and windowed exterior offices (the one pictured here) all to myself instead of my previous smaller and windowless office.

This has had the effect of both upsetting the previous pro/con, yin/yang balance of one’s office, and it has also meant that some folks have come out much better, a few (almost) exactly the same, and a few much worse. If I weren’t the program coordinator right now, I would have had an interior office because I’m not quite there seniority-wise. If enough people retire before I am finished being coordinator and nothing else changes, I’ll get to keep this larger, windowed office. Maybe.
There’s been some grumbling about this arrangement. I have to say I have a certain amount of what I can only describe as “survivor guilt” about all this because I have definitely come out ahead in the office shuffle, while others have either come out about the same or even a little behind. And there probably is a more robust way to decide who is in what office. I know of at least one senior colleague in an exterior office who is never there, for example. It seems a bit of a waste that this person gets one of the nicer, bigger offices, doesn’t it?

My own way of dealing with this is I am trying to make much more use of my office and I have once again shifted my scholarly/professional “stuff” into that space. When I first came to EMU back in 1998, I had almost all of my stuff in my school office because we lived an apartment that wasn’t that big. Then when we bought our house, Annette and I both set up offices in our basement, and over the next eight or so years, my stuff migrated back home and to different places in the house. In fact, by the time I had to pack up for the move out of Pray-Harrold into Hoyt for our year in exile, there was really nothing in my office anymore I really needed.

So now, I’m circling back to the point where I started at EMU and have shifted everything back into Pray-Harrold. I even bought some extra shelving. I tell myself that I am trying to make a clearer division between “life” and “work,” with the work stuff staying up in Pray-Harrold; though I still have a home office and desk space too, and I am sure I will continue to do plenty of work here too. But at this point in my career, I suspect I won’t be shelping all this stuff back home until I am completely done and retired.

August 14, 2011

This WIDE-EMU thing might just work

I’ve posted about this on Facebook and Twitter and Google Plus and the like, but I’ll post about it here too: the deadline for proposals for the WIDE-EMU is tomorrow. This started as one of those things people talk about on a long car trip– specifically, me, Derek, and Bill HD on the way back from the CCCCs in Atlanta– that might or might not amount to anything. And it’s too early to tell if it will ultimately amount to much.

Still, I think we’ve seen enough interest here to make this fly, meaning that I feel past that fear of what happens if you have a party and no one comes. There’s enough “there there” for us to make a go of this, I think.

I’m interested in seeing what comes of this first proposal phase and the next pre-(un)conference phase of course, not to mention the actually f2f meeting in October. But at this moment, I’m mostly interested in seeing if it is possible for the free and quasi-impromptu (un)conference to succeed. Remember: this is costing us and participants (in theory) nothing, which puts into stark relief those many conferences out there that cost lots and lots of money. And that also seem to be the same old conference.

So like I said, stay tuned. But in the meantime, submit a proposal if you are in the SE Michigan neighborhood.

June 2, 2011

Sprung

I have meant to post here about a variety of different things– some articles on assessment I read a while ago as part of my “reading academic journal articles” series, some iPad things, some garden things, etc.– but I’ve been more busy at EMUTalk.org and I have been swamped by the blessing and the curse that is “spring term” here at EMU. What everyone else in the world calls “spring,” we call winter (e.g., the term that runs from January until April/May). “Spring” is the first 7.5 week term that runs from the first week of May until late June– specifically, June 2o this year, and then there’s “summer,” which starts up a few days after spring ends and finishes another 7.5 weeks later in August.

The good thing about teaching in the spring is money: basically, I get paid “extra” or “overtime” money for teaching in the spring and/or summer terms. It’s a significant amount, too– 10% of a faculty member’s base salary for each class taught in load– and its money that I have come to count on to pay for some very specific bills and for other “extras” like paying off debt, trips, etc.

The bad? I suppose the main thing is it’s work, which is the opposite of “not working.”

It’s intense for everyone because, as I say frequently and mantra-like to my students, it is not half as long as a regular semester so much as it is twice as fast. Students in both of my classes (I’m teaching a f2f section of “freshman comp”— which is only sort of about “freshman” in the spring since a lot of the students are juniors and seniors– and an online section Writing for the WWW) were voicing concern about the workload, and someone in my comp class asked aloud and a little indignantly just how much time did I expect students to spend on the class. So I did the math. The class meets for about six hours a week, and I always tell my online students that they should expect to spend at least as much time online and engaged in the class as they would if it were meeting f2f. While I have never believed the classic college advice of spending three hours studying/working on a class for every hour spent in class, I do think about two hours per hour of class is a reasonable guestimate for outside of class reading, writing, studying, etc.

Give or take then, I told my students to figure on about 20 hours a week per class in the shorter term. Add another class into that mix plus a job plus some version of “a life” and it is no wonder why so many students struggle in the spring, and no wonder why I feel pretty spent myself.

It’s not all bad, of course. Students in the spring/summer terms tend to have some interesting “life” stories, and I have several of those students in both classes. For the most part, the ones who have stuck with it have been doing well. And while it is not quite as good as “not working” at all, a) there aren’t quite as many other meetings and such during spring and summer (though there are plenty), b) I do have some time to do more spring/summer activities (I’ll be gardening yet this morning), and c) I do like money.

Incidentally, two teaching strategy-type things based on stuff that happened in the winter are beginning to pay off for this spring. In the online class, I have instituted an “online attendance” policy which more or less requires a student to post at least twice a week at different times of the week to demonstrate “presence.” Mind you, this minimal attendance earns the student a bad participation grade, but the idea is that if a student is not posting at all, they are absent. And, as is the case with face to face classes, if a student misses too much class, they fail, regardless of any other grade in the course. I think this has “worked” in the sense that it has given a few students reality checks on what it takes to do an online class successfully.

The other different approach thing is based on last term’s “Gradeinator” approach with google docs. Instead of doing all that, I’ve taken a much more simple approach in my English 121 class this term. For each of the major peer review sessions of the class, I’ve set up a single Google survey. Students complete the peer reviews for each of the writers in their groups, and they fill out the simple survey (here’s an example of what I’ve done so far) for each writer they review– typically three or four times. Besides being dramatically easier, the nice thing about this approach is it keeps all the data on one spreadsheet (though I still have to go through some rig-a-ma-roll to get the results to individual students) and it makes it very easy for me to keep track of who has (or hasn’t) done a good job being a reviewer. So this is a keeper.

Anyway, 18 more days.

April 24, 2010

Thoughts at the end of winter term, beginning of spring “break”

I just posted the final grades for the winter term (well, all but one– a student emailed me a corrupted file), meaning the spring “break” begins. I say “break” like that because, like all academics, I feel compelled to be a bit defensive about how professors don’t really get the whole summer off, that it’s not like I am going to be on “vacation.” I actually have an unusual number (for me) of projects in progress that need attention during May and June, and I will be teaching again in the summer term, which begins at the end of June. Still, I won’t be teaching anything for the first term in at least three years, and we really will be taking an honest-to-goodness vacation in mid June.

Anyway, some thoughts on the term that was, the coming spring, and other things, in no particular order:

Continue reading “Thoughts at the end of winter term, beginning of spring “break””

April 14, 2010

A CCCC 2011 Proposal idea and Preparing for Exile

Alex had a post on his blog yesterday about academic workspaces that got me to thinking about both the CCCCs for 2011 and the impending vacating of Pray-Harrold that is about to happen. (BTW, Alex: what’s that thing to the right of your laptop? And why don’t you put up a poster or something in there?)

Pray-Harrold is the building where my department (English Language and Literature) is located. It is by far the largest building on campus, seven stories of lecture halls, classrooms, and offices. Something like 500-700 faculty and staff have offices in there, and around 10,000 students are in and out of the building every day. This explains one of the somewhat unusual quirks of working in this department: while faculty at most universities routinely teach in different buildings, almost all of my department’s classes have been taught in Pray-Harrold for the last forty years. I have very senior colleagues who have never taught anywhere else on campus.

Built in 1969, I believe the technical term for the current state of Pray-Harrold is “shit hole.” Not unlike many academic buildings, especially those housing things like English, History, Philosophy, and Political Science, Pray-Harrold has been long-neglected and often complained about, and with good reason. But now, after years and years of discussion, Pray-Harrold is finally going to be renovated, a project that will not be enough but that will be better than nothing. I guess. But that’s a slightly different conversation.

In any event, Alex’s post and the CCCC’s call for proposals is on my mind with all this for a couple of different reasons. Everyone who currently occupies Pray-Harrold, those hundreds of staff and faculty who have offices that they use or don’t use, are being moved from the building by the end of this month to various locations around campus for about 18 or so months. Needless to say, this is all causing a lot of “contested space” discussions on campus. The English department is going to be occupying about 6 floors of a dorm on campus. The main department office (including the department printers/photocopiers) is going to be on the ground floor, which means I am not looking forward to printing much of anything. All of the teaching that used to be under one roof are going to be all over the place, and very senior colleagues (and many not so senior ones too) are already grousing about the fact that they will actually be forced to go out of doors during the Michigan winter.

My school office is not unlike Alex’s, at least in how its used. I have posters, pictures, toys, and other various bric-a-brac, including a four foot inflatable Scream doll, but I do most of my work at home or in coffee shops; like Alex, my main use for my school office is to meet with students. I do have colleagues who do actually use their offices as “an office,” and I have one colleague who will go unnamed who has an office that has an unreasonable amount of paper and books and just junk. How to describe it… well, if I had kept every scrap of paper and/or book I read or wrote over the last 22 years, from the time I started as a graduate assistant to now, every student draft and test and quiz, every chunk of my dissertation with revision comments, every stupid memo and strategic planning and/or outcome report, everything, then I might have an office that looks a bit like this person’s office.

The contentiousness of space isn’t limited to those of us who are going to be in exile, either. The Pray-Harrold remodeling is going to disrupt the entire campus, and there already have been “turf war” squabbles among different divisions/colleges who don’t want to let the unwashed Pray-Harrold masses into their buildings to teach or (God forbid!) to have offices. Computer lab teaching spaces are going to be sketchy at best, and we’ve already run into some problems of classes being scheduled in closets.

So yeah, contested spaces.

I’m not entirely sure how this will (or really if it will) play out as a CCCCs proposal yet, in part because it would be a proposal about what is to come next year, always a potentially difficult to sketch out this far in advance. We’ll see; I’m mulling it over in my own head and with some of my colleagues here.

As far as the office in exile and beyond goes: stay tuned, but I think working (sort of) in the dorms might be okay for a year or so. Since there is no air-conditioning, the spring/summer terms in there will be pretty intolerable. On the other hand, it’ll be closer to the EMU Student Center than Pray-Harrold, and since these dorm rooms are suites, the bathroom comforts ought to be pretty nice. It’s hard to know what will come next when we move back after the construction, but I am thinking very much about a set-up without a desk and with some comfy furniture, a shelf or two, and a table, a space more conducive for how I use the place as it is now.

January 29, 2009

Scott McCloud at TED

Via Johndan’s blog, I came across Scott McCloud’s talk at TED:

I only got a chance to watch the first few minutes of it (another crazy busy day ahead of me, though soon the craziness will end and it will settle back to just busy), but it looks a lot like the talk McCloud gave at EMU a few years back. I may very well have to teach this in English 328 or English 516 this term. Maybe both.

September 19, 2008

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