Before I get down to some biz-ness, I decided to take a look at Daring Fireball, one of my (new though it’s not a new blog) regular reads. In the “colophon” section, we learn a little more about the site’s author and such, and this little bit about web standards:
Web standards are important, and Daring Fireball adheres to them. Specifically, Daring Fireball’s HTML markup should validate as either HTML 5 or XHTML 4.01 Transitional, its layout is constructed using valid CSS, and its syndicated feed is valid Atom.
If Daring Fireball looks goofy in your browser, you’re likely using a shitty browser that doesn’t support web standards. Internet Explorer, I’m looking in your direction. If you complain about this, I will laugh at you, because I do not care. If, however, you are using a modern, standards-compliant browser and have trouble viewing or reading Daring Fireball, please do let me know.
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.
“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.
Via Will Richardson’s blog and his entry “Transformative Technology? Really?” about a video from a company (maybe the company? I don’t know) that makes “smart boards,” those touch screen white boards where you can project all kinds of stuff. Here’s a link to the video (I don’t think there’s a way to embed it). The video shows elementary school teachers using the board and discussing its use in mock interview-style discussion.
It’s all rather bothersome in at least two different ways. First, I swear they say “ease” or “easy” at least 30 times in this 5 minute video. Second, the uses they demonstrate of this board aren’t exactly “transformative:” really, it seems to replicate classic elementary school pedagogy, with students sitting in neat rows, the teacher pointing at something on the board, and, instead of writing with chalk and erasing with an eraser, the teacher just uses his hand! Wow! And to the extent that the students are actually involved in using these things, it is to do stuff that would just as easily be done on a whiteboard or a chalkboard.
It’s all rather odd because I know these smart boards can actually be interesting tools. They have them at Will’s school (none in Pray-Harrold as far as I know, and I don’t think there will be any coming into the building anytime soon), and, from what I’ve seen, Will and his teachers use them a lot to project some sort of web-based thing, to project some sort of slide show, and/or to demonstrate something on the computer desktop the teacher wants to show. The touch screen makes it a lot easier to do these things than it is with a computer hooked up to a projector. And at Will’s school, I think the students play around with them as much the teachers– at least that’s what I’ve seen.
It’s funny because it’s true, and the smartboard promo video is also not funny because it’s true.
I wrote an essay a while back about chalkboards as a technology, and I quoted Larry Cuban in it as saying something along the lines of teachers don’t change the way they do things as a result of technology just because they can. Rather, teachers change the way they do things as a result of technology if they perceive that new use of technology as being beneficial to their teaching– both for their students and themselves.
I guess I’d amend/revise that slightly. If teachers aren’t willing or aren’t able to really rethink the way that technologies can transform their teaching, then they shouldn’t bother with the expense and hassle of things like “smart” boards. And if teachers want it all to be so “easy” that they don’t have to think about it all, well, that’s kinda dumb. I worry about this at my own institution where I see some of my colleagues wanting things like “smart” boards and other bells and whistles not because they would do anything significantly or meaningfully different because it’s cool. Kind of like that Monty Python sketch about the button that goes “bing.”
Actually, that University of Denver video has some good advice for getting started with teaching with technology: get the students involved, allow for more collaboration, and don’t be boring. Of course, the professor at the end of that video also talks about trying out “those clickers.”
I have been procrastinating from cleaning my office by a) teaching (well, that’s kinda my job, so that doesn’t count as procrastination), and b) looking through some piled up google reader links. So in an effort to put off office cleaning a bit longer, here’s a bunch of links in no particular order:
3×3 from prof hacker. I actually end up doing this sort of thing pretty regularly on my blog. Pretty good advice, I think.
From The Rumpus.net, Conversations About the Internet. I got here because of conversation #5 with an Anonymous Facebook Employee, but there’s a lot of cool ones here, all things I’m really interested in.
Harper’s Index “index.” Also via Boing-Boing. This is super-cool: enter in a search term and you get back Harper’s Index stuff. It has to be in their database, of course; Michigan was, but Ypsilanti wasn’t.
“Textbooks for Rent… Everywhere.” From Inside Higher Ed; among other “fun facts” from the article is that the claim is that the textbook industry does $7-9 billion in US sales annually. Whaa???
Cory Doctorow: Close Enough for Rock ‘n’ Roll, which is summed up as “New media don’t succeed because they’re like the old media, only better: they succeed because they’re worse than the old media at the stuff the old media is good at, and better at the stuff the old media are bad at.” It makes a lot of sense, actually.
There’s actually a longer post embedded in some of these items, but for now, I thought I’d just get some of these down here. After all, I had intended on doing so last night but went to bed instead….
Cheryl Ball posted on Tech-Rhet asking about a Mac organizing software from a company (or maybe that’s the software) called Circus Ponies. It’s an organizational tool, which might be useful, though I find that my problems with organization and/or “getting things done” are not software-related.
Talking/working with Derek on a panel, and two ideas I want to get down before I forget: 1) it sure seems like a lot of people (including me) aren’t blogging at the same rate they used to blog (that’s a post one of these days, btw), and 2) while Facebook and Twitter are kinda cool, they aren’t a very good replacement for blogs.
Where have blogs gone? Well, one theory I have is as newspapers and other print journalism go online, they are pressing into the space that was once occupied more by individuals. This is not to say that individual blogs are going to go away, but why read (or even write) on your own individual blog if there is going to be a big newspaper out there willing and able to host your posts and comments?
Alex Reid has a nice post about learning to write and how it impacts how we should and shouldn’t teach classes like first year writing. I’ll need to come back to this. I never actually took first year writing– I tested out of it. I even was videotaped giving the speech I gave to get out of it, and I believe they took me and the other people who tested out to a lunch. Thinking back on it briefly now, I believe we were an informal focus group.
Fine writing advice, he gist of which I give all the time and which I have to work very hard at myself to follow (and I frequently fail at that).
I kind of feel like I been a teleworker/web worker/distance worker/whatever for a long time, but that’s because I teach a fair amount online, and also because tenure-track faculty tend to have the luxury of working wherever they want. Of course, the problem with “decentralized” work in general and defining “the work” of a college professor in particular is that I’m always working, in an office or not.
“The lost chicken hatcheries of Iowa City, IA.” Of course I have to note that, even though I am not all that crazy about chickens in Ypsilanti (I have yet to spot a coop in my neighborhood).
Via this post on Henry Jenkins’ blog (who is moving his blog to his new digs at USC– hopefully this address will stay the same with no problems) comes information and a recommendation for “digital_nation: Life on the Virtual Frontier” from PBS’ Frontline. It looks cool; I’m not sure if it’s aired yet or not, but there are some interesting video clips. It could be good for 516, and even for the first year writing class I’m teaching right now where there are some students working on social networks for their research projects.
On the other hand, I have to say that I’m not entirely a fan of some of the people featured here. For example, I personally have yet to be convinced that danah boyd’s work youth culture online is based on anything beyond common sense, her own gut feeling, and some experiences talking with kids. Maybe her talk at U of M in a couple of weeks will change my mind. And I think that Marc Prensky’s idea of “digital natives” is pretty much wrong in all sorts of ways. But hey, these are the folks that PBS is talking to, and these are the folks who are leading, for better or worse. And even if I think they’re wrong, they’re still interesting.
There was a good article in the Chronicle of Higher Ed the other day, “Studies Explore Whether the Internet Makes Students Better Writers.” I think it might make for good reading/discussion for English 516, where this basic question of “are computers helping students be better writers” often comes up. I like this passage from Jeff Grabill too:
“The unstated assumption there is that if you can write a good essay for your literature professor, you can write anything,” Mr. Grabill says. “That’s utter nonsense.”
The writing done outside of class is, in some ways, the opposite of a traditional academic paper, he says. Much out-of-class writing, he says, is for a broad audience instead of a single professor, tries to solve real-world problems rather than accomplish academic goals, and resembles a conversation more than an argument.
Rather than being seen as an impoverished, secondary form, online writing should be seen as “the new normal,” he says, and treated in the curriculum as such: “The writing that students do in their lives is a tremendous resource.”
But I guess this does prompt me to think about/mention two things:
My guess/gut feeling is that a lot of the expression students have about how they “like” to write more outside of school than inside of it has a lot more to do with school than it has to do with what it is they’re writing. I agree with Grabill about trying to give assignments in classes about real world problems, things that resemble conversation rather than academic, five paragraph, “there are three problems with x” kind of essays. But no matter what I do to incorporate these kinds of writing assignments into my courses, there is still all the apparatus of the situation. I mean, none of this is voluntary. I wouldn’t be doing these assignments and this teaching if I wasn’t empowered (and paid!) as a college professor, and my students wouldn’t be doing this if they weren’t trying to complete coursework and a degree program. So there’s always going to be a division between writing students do for school and writing they do “outside of school” not because of the kind of writing but because of the situation of writing, which is school.
Despite the headline, it seems to me that neither of these studies is actually trying to answer the “do computers make students better writers;” rather, both seem to be studying how students actually practice their writing in and out of the classroom with computers. Which is a good thing. My take on the “do computer technologies help make student better writers?” is that it is really an irrelevant question because it is what students and everyone else uses to write nowadays. If someone did a study and somehow was able to prove that people “wrote better” when they used a quill and parchment (or hell, just pens and paper), it wouldn’t make any difference because I think most people nowadays find using these older tools to be a pain in the ass.
And really, the stuff that Grabill is talking about in the part I quote isn’t about technology. You can teach a dreadful academic research paper kind of class in a computer lab, too.
Via boing-boing, I learned about Us Now, which is a documentary film/project “about the power of mass collaboration, government and the internet.” I don’t really have time to watch it right now, but I can imagine this being something worthwhile for English 444 this summer and maybe 328/516 in the near future.
I think the story has been, ironically enough, somewhat mis-reported. True, fewer people are reading paper/printed newspapers. But when I talk to people who actually know about newspapers, what they tell me is that the loss of revenue that is just crushing them is classifieds. So it isn’t things like Google News or online versions of the newspapers that are doing them in; it’s things like Craig’s List and Monster.com This might seem like an overly nuanced take on this, but all the reported news I’ve heard has been about how the demise of newspapers has been the result of them giving away its content, when really, these other services invented a better mousetrap
On the one hand, newspapers are folding because they aren’t making any/enough money. “We can’t make money at this anymore.” Well, maybe newspapers need to figure out a better business plan or they need to acknowledge they are no longer relevant because of the technology. On the other hand, this is bad because the press as the “fourth estate” stuff. “But we need to protect democracy!” Well, maybe newspapers need to reorganize as not-for-profit entities more akin to public radio/TV, or as foundations like the Pew Trusts. But the only way that newspapers can stay both profitable and a force for democracy is to travel back in time.
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