Category: Life

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Obama/Biden=Mac; a NYTimes dream; the YouTube “actually good” video contest

I came across three things right in a row that I want to post this morning, but I don’t have time to write/talk about any of them. Luckily, they mostly speak for themselves.

First off, yet another reason to like Obama/Biden: they are apparently both Mac users. See this piece, and the boing boing entry on it.

Second, via Mark Maynard and an Facebook entry, there is this spot-on dream/wishful thinking of a July 4, 2009 New York Times. Yes, I want all of these things too. But let’s be careful and not have too many unrealistic expectations for the President-elect. Bush left a hell of a mess to clean up.

And finally, the Onion announces a (fake?) YouTube contest where users will win $100,000 if they make a video that is “actually good:”

YouTube Contest Challenges Users To Make A ‘Good’ Video

I gotta show this one to my 328 students who are trying to make videos right now, good or otherwise.

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“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….

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The Greenhills adventure so far

I’ve been at a couple of functions over the last few weeks where I end up talking with friends and acquaintances about their kids and schools. It can be awkward. One of the most popular (and not necessarily in a good way) posts I’ve had here in a long time is the one where I wrote about leaving public schooling behind, and a lot of the over beers/wine conversation at parties has been about how happy friends’ kids are at West Middle School (in Ypsi), or in the Ann Arbor public schools, or wherever.

Now, I mean absolutely nothing bad about these schools at all, and I do think that the different kids/different situations thing means a lot. These other schools are good schools, no doubt about that– though I do think it’s interesting that virtually everyone that we hang around with has nothing good to say about East Middle School in Ypsi. And be aware that I still have liberal guilt– at least a smidgen of it.

But Greenhills has been a mighty fine choice for us.

I was thinking about this because of some of the stuff that Will has been able to do lately and what the experiences has been “like” so far. In no particular order:

  • Will is on the chess team, which starts having meets next week or so, and which practices every Friday afternoon. There are like 25 kids of all ages on this team.
  • I think there are about 65 or so kids in his entire sixth grade. I think there are something like 500-600 kids total, 6 through 12.
  • I believe he is still active in the Manga club, though the D&D game club has yet to get off the ground because of scheduling problems.
  • He and a partner were doing this project in his science class (you will note many of these moments are about science class) that involved building a little bridge out of various household products. He and his partner didn’t pull it off in the time allotted in class, and Will was pretty disappointed about it. But that night, we had a voicemail message from his bridge partner about how he wanted to go in early the next day to finish it. So the next day, we dropped off Will 45 minutes early, and he and his partner figured it out.
  • All of the books he is reading and the writing he is doing in his English class are happily endorsed by Will’s English professor parents.
  • Will’s Latin teacher (and this is a class he is enjoying a great deal) insisted that each of his students bring him one piece of Halloween candy.
  • So far, field trips/special day things have included going to a nature center of some sort, going to a rope course (crossing bridges, zip lines, etc.), going to the SOS office in Ypsi to talk about homelessness and such and to also put together some care packages for homeless kids, and hosting a bunch of “special needs” kids for some kind of event at Greenhills.
  • The other night, Will and the other sixth graders were at the Ann Arbor Hands On museum for an event where the kids did all kinds of various things. Will ended up dissecting a cow eyeball.
  • Will has been pestering lately about how to use a video camera because one of the options for the multimedia project in his science class on plate tectonics is to make a movie. I have a feeling I might have to “act” in said movie, too.

So yeah, things are good. Maybe Will would have had a similar list of adventures at West Middle, and I know that some of Will’s friends who are going there are doing fantastic. But things are good.

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This probably doesn’t count as book research, but it’s probably the only research I’m going to do this week…

Via Alex Halavais’ blog feed, I came across this article on the Financial Times web site, “Net prophets,” which is a review article of three different books out/coming out about search engines, including Halavais’ forthcoming book.

It is the sort of thing that would be good to include for English 516, but it’s on my mind this morning in my waning “Blogs as Writerly Spaces” project and the chapter/part on rhetorical situation. Which is itself on my mind since that was the topic (more or less) from last night’s section of English 505. I haven’t quite figured it out yet, but I it seems to me that search engines throw a wrench into the role of audience in rhetorical situation, no matter how firmly (Bitzer) of fuzzily (Bisecker ala Derrida) you define “audience” or any other constituent in situations.

I think that Jenny Edbauer is on to something with “Unframing Models of Public Distribution: From Rhetorical Situation to Rhetorical Ecologies,” that isn’t quite talking about the phenomenon of search-fueled audiences and spikes in audiences as a result of searches– as I experienced quite personally with the EMU faculty strike a few years ago.

Anyway, this is all the BAWS thinking I get today. Too much voting, too much grading, and (hopefully) too much celebrating, more or less in that order.

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Halloweening

Obama ( yes we carve) and Pumpkin Eater PumpkinsWe had an absolutely beautiful night for Halloween this year– maybe in the fifties, clear skies, no wind, etc. And as a result, we had lots and lots of trick and/or treaters. Ours is a neighborhood that always gets a lot of trick and/or treaters, and this year we ended up giving away about 750 pieces of candy. Cheap candy, I should point out– we get big bulk bags from Costco of Tootsie Rolls, Smarties, Laffy Taffy, etc.

I felt kind of bad. Andre and Dickish McBastard (et al) stopped by and tried trick and/or treating for beer, and I balked. I only had a couple left, guys. I owe you a couple at the Corner or something like that.

As usual, Will dressed as a knight– well, sort of, since his costume was kind of incomplete, but he was unwilling to wear a hat. As usual, Annette accompanied Will on his candy rounds while I passed out candy. This year, I dressed up as Steve from Blue’s Clues (years and years ago, when Will went trick and/or treating as Blue from Blue’s Clues, I went through a tremendous amount of work to get the perfect shirt), and several small children (and Andre and Stephanie) recognized me as “Steve.”

Interestingly, Will got to a point where he decided it was more fun to give out candy than to actually trick and/or treat himself. So Will sat in the chair I was in for much of the night in the front yard (like I said, it was a beautiful night) and lorded over the candy while Annette and I sat on the stoop and drank wine. An excellent Halloween indeed.

By the way, I received many compliments on my Obama pumpkin. I’m going to take this as a good sign for Tuesday. The pumpkin on the right is one that Will carved at school with his “senior buddies,” which is a program at Greenhills that pairs up sixth graders with 12th graders for various activities, like carving pumpkins. This is a pumpkin eating a pumpkin, which was Will’s idea and one that got from a FoodTV show we were watching the other night.

Oh, and the pumpkins in my new header are here:

Halloween Pumpkins

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Of course I’m going to vote; if I don’t…

Three or four people have now sent me this:

I’m not sure if I am getting this because people are afraid I won’t vote, they know I would appreciate both the humor and the technology, if I am the easy butt of jokes, or some combination of all of the above. But don’t worry; I’ll do my part on Tuesday.

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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.