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On the way back from Will’s and my recent trip to Alabama, I finally managed to finish reading David Allen’s Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity. I am aware of the irony that it has taken me months of off and on reading to finish this book. Why was I reading it in the first place, you may ask? Well, I picked up this book and, my next read on productivity, Timothy Ferriss’ The 4-Hour Workweek, vaguely thinking that there might be a scholarly project of some sort in there.

Based on flipping through both books and reading their back covers, my initial impression was that these books take opposite views on the notion of “productivity.” Allen’s book, I presumed, was about how to get more things done, while Ferriss’ book was about how to recognize what you don’t need to do so you have more time to do thing things you want to do. I thought (and still do think) that dichotomy is potentially interesting, though don’t ask me now what that paper/presentation/article/web site/book looks like.

And besides that, I thought I might actually learn something about being more productive.

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There’s an interesting article in CHE right now, “Scholars Turn Their Attention to Attention,” about various research and perspectives on multitasking– or rather, the myth of multitasking.  There must be something in the air about multitasking and the bane of every non-multitasker’s existence, talking on the phone while driving.  Just yesterday, I was listening to NPR’s “Talk of the Nation” to US Secretary of Transportation Ray LaHood sounding a little like a crazy old man about the need to keep both hands on the wheel at all times.  I do not understand how someone can text and drive at the same time, I don’t think bus drivers or truckers ought to be talking on their cell phones (unless they have something like a head set), and I try to use my headphones when I’m driving and talking on the phone.  But doing anything while driving is pontentially dangerous, including perfectly legal (and even encouraged!) things like eating, drinking (I’ll bet spilled coffee in the lap is responsible for many more auto accidents than cell phone class), talking to others, listening to super-duper loud music, etc.

Wait, I got distracted.  Where was I?  Oh yeah, multitasking….

The CHE article is good and probably worth teaching because it covers the issue from a variety of different angles– certainly not just from the “multitasking is bad” one.  There’s some kind of information here about the “history” of research on multitasking and various experiments, but I have to say (as someone who doesn’t do this kind of research) that a lot of this seems kind of like parlor games to me.  For example:

As far back as the 1890s, experimental psychologists were testing people’s ability to direct their attention to multiple tasks. One early researcher asked her subjects to read aloud from a novel while simultaneously writing the letter A as many times as possible. Another had people sort cards of various shapes while counting aloud by threes.

Well, duh, but isn’t that more like making someone say the alphabet backwards during a sobriety test or something?  I don’t know if that necessarily tests a person’s ability to do more than one thing at once though giving most attention to a single task.  For example, as I am writing this post, I am listening to my iPhone (REM right now) and I was just interrupted to take a phone call from my wife.  That’s multitasking, but it’s not like what these people seem to mean by multitasking.

Or I guess that’s the problem here– I’m not sure there’s a very clear definition of what multitasking is.  For example, part of the argument that comes up against multitasking is that increasingly old school argument about no laptops in the classroom.  Here’s an extreme example of that:

“I’m teaching a class of first-year students,” says David E. Meyer, a professor of psychology at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. “This might well have been the very first class they walked into in their college careers. I handed out a sheet that said, ‘Thou shalt have no electronic devices in the classroom.’ … I don’t want to see students with their computers out, because you know they’re surfing the Web. I don’t want to see them taking notes. I want to see them paying attention to me.”

I don’t know who Meyers is or what his scholarship says, but that last line– I want them paying attention to me– seems pretty telling and egocentric.  And  it’s this potential lack of paying attention to me, the professor/teacher/sage on the stage/keeper o’ wisdom that has got most people like Meyers thinking like this.  Don’t get me wrong; I will sometimes ask students to close up their laptops to pay attention to something, especially if it is one of those times I have to go into a five minute lecture “about important stuff for the class” mode.  But generally, I don’t want to be the center of the class, and if my students find it easy to be distracted by Facebook (or whatever), then it’s probably a combination of me being boring or them not wanting to be in class.

One more thing:  I don’t think multitasking is even remotely a phenomenon that has come abut only with the age of the Internet.  I grew up in a multitasking household.  The television was ALWAYS on when I was a kid, and now when I am home visiting my parents, three sisters, and all the kids and in-laws (I think it’s 17 0r 18 people total), it is not at all uncommon for their to be three different televisions in different rooms but still within sight, all tuned to different channels.  My parents always read the newspaper or magazine while watching TV (or with the TV on– I’m not sure the difference was ever very clear when I was a kid), and layered over that would always be some kind of conversation.  When I go back home now, all of my adult siblings and their spouses will sit around watching TV, playing some kind of game, checking laptops or cell phones, watching children, eating snacks, and planning the next meal, all at the same time.

I mean, really:  in “real life,” who just “pays attention?”

I know that the image there is going to be too small to read, but go ahead and click on it to read it.  This comes from Lucy Knisley who seems to be a bit of a Renaissance woman of sorts with comics, journal writings, illustrations, crafts, etc., etc.

Really REALLY smart stuff about a group of old school comics folks lamenting the falling of print, which was written and drawn by a comic artist who is obviously enthusiastic about digital books.  As she points out, there was a point in the past where these codex book things were weird (where’s the scroll?), and of course there was a time where print itself was weird, too (why are all the letters so neat and orderly?), not to mention stuff like page numbers, etc.  And, as she writes here, “I’d just rather not expend all my energy worrying over how my words are delivered, and instead concentrate on the quality and content of the words.”  Exactly, and the problem with journalism and traditional publishers is that they keep thinking that they are in the bottle business instead of the wine business.

Anyway, this also jarred in me the question again about “e-readers” or electronic books or whatever you want to call them. Knisley talks in this comic about reading stuff on her iPod/iPhone, but I don’t know if I could/would be willing to do that.  I don’t mind reading blogs or email or similarly “short” sort of things on my iPod, but I don’t know if I’d want to read a book-length work on my phone.  Too little of a window for me.

The Kindle is still problematic for my own reading tastes, as far as I can tell.  I don’t really like the way that the device is locked down/locked into amazon.com only content (remember that infamous 1984 issue?), it apparently doesn’t handle PDF files well, and it doesn’t allow for easy annotations.  I’ve heard good things about Barnes and Noble’s Nook, but I’d certainly want to play around with it.  For me, the ability to handle the PDFs from academic journals and the things I assign students to read in various classes.  I don’t need one of these things to “just read” novels or magazines or whatever, which perhaps makes me a reader who is not in the marking plan for companies like amazon.com or B&N.

Anyway, must reading for 516 and/or 444, probably for 328 too.

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?
• Clancy “CultureCat” Ratliff notes some of the writing on the backs of desk chairs of classrooms where she is doing evaluations.
• 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.
• What’s the big trend now?  Nowism.  Actually, it’s more interesting than it sounds.  I like the list of “now applications” that are down the page a ways, and I like the term “Liquid Modernity” which comes from Zygmunt Bauman.
• “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).

I like book stores, and I was pretty bummed out when Shaman Drum closed up in Ann Arbor in the spring.  In my estimation, it was clearly the best bookstore in the area and one of the best academic/independent bookstores in the country.  And I also like the “big box” stores like Barnes and Noble and Ann Arbor’s own Borders for the variety, all the extras (CDs, coffee shops, etc.), and, of course, books.

Still, there is a reason why Borders (and I presume Barnes and Noble, right?) are losing money hand over fist and why I end up spending a lot more money on books at amazon.com nowadays.

I went into Borders today while running some errands to buy Crossing the Finish Line:  Completing College at America’s Public Universities and The TOON Treasury of Classic Children’s Comics. Initially, I can’t find anyone who actually works there to help me, so I head to the computer system to look up the Crossing the Finish Line book.  I learn the book is “likely” in the store in the “Education and Parenting” section, though I have no clue where the “Education and Parenting” section is in the store.   So I wander around for a while (is it near psychology?  self-help? business?), and I finally find someone, who tells me it’s back in the children’s section.  I find the shelf, which is a mish-mosh of books on stuff like potty training, Hirsch’s “cultural literacy” books, and high schools today, and remarkably, I do find this book (which is a somewhat controversial book about graduation rates at universities in the U.S.) stuck in there.  So I picked it up, comfortable enough with the $27.95 price.

Then I decided to look for the other book.  Again, I tried it on the computer system, but the answer I got was confusing, so I asked for some help from the person who helped before.  She actually logged into a completely different computer system and was able to find the book, which was in the store (though not anywhere close to the children’s section).  But it was priced at $40, and I knew that I could get it on amazon.com for $26.40, and it wasn’t going to cost $13 to ship it.  So I took a pass on that.  And in hindsight, I should have left Crossing the Finish Line on the shelf too because I would have saved $10 buying that via amazon.com.

Oh, and just to add to it, there was but one cashier at the register, so it took me about 10 minutes just to pay my bill.

So, let’s review:

• Buying online would have been faster, easier, cheaper, and more convenient, by far.
• It would have been easier to find what I was looking for online.
• On the other hand, actually going to the store allowed me to communicate with a human and to make an impulse buy (in this case, a different anthology of comics).  That’s certainly a plus of “real world” shopping, but it’s also one of the reasons why I wish Shaman Drum was still open.

So I like this, too:  André Kertész: On Reading, which I found via Randy Baier on Twitter.

I’m having a relatively quiet evening here watching some TV and surfing the ‘net, so I thought I’d post a few links of stuff I’ve come across:

• “The Furlough Blues: Or, How I spent my 12 days of university-ordered, unpaid leave”by Keith Miller from CHE about this situation at Arizona State University. I completely understand where Miller is coming from: I have no idea how I would handle this either, and I sure as heck hope it doesn’t come to EMU.
• Over at Writing for Ants, “Give the machines what they deserve” is about this recent Inside Higher Ed article about this dubious services by StraighterLine to teach first year comp for dirt-cheap. There was a lot of outrage about all this on WPA-L (including by me), and I think this is a good commentary as well. But interestingly enough, the same night I came across this…
• …“Accreditor Eyes Course Outsourcing,” which is another Inside Higher Ed article about StraighterLine. Here’s a quote:
  

  “It turns out that students and faculty members aren’t the only ones seeking more information about an arrangement between Fort Hays State University and a company that sells online general education courses for $99 each. The arrangement was a surprise to Fort Hays’ accreditor, the North Central Association of College and Schools, which is now asking questions.

  North Central is also examining the company’s relationship with two for-profit institutions it accredits: Ellis University and Grand Canyon University.

• “Ward Churchill Redux” is Stanley Fish’s response/summary/commentary on the resolution of the Churchill affair. We’ll see if this is the end of this deal or not.
• A couple of good posts about the decline of the newspaper business: “That Whining Sound You Hear Is The Death Wheeze Of Newspapers” from TechCrunch, “As Newspapers Implode, Diverse Voices Move Online” from MediaShift, and “The Speech the NAA Should Hear” from BuzzMachine by Jeff Jarvis. I have to say I kind of agree with these critiques.
• Best Online Collaboration Tools of 2009. This is kind of a weird one– you’ve got to scroll around the page to see stuff– but there are oodles of social networking/collaboration tools here, maybe some things to think about when I try to get students to make collaborative movies online again.
• Will Richardson interviewed Kathy Yancey– one of those things to come back to later.

I am basking in the semi-warm glow of being vaguely caught up with my teaching for the first time in two weeks. Not that it means that much; I still need to get back in gear with research and writing, we need to get ready around here for our an annual function for this weekend, and we still haven’t quite figured out what we’re going to be doing when we go to D.C. next week. But none of this has stopped me from posting something that might actually be useful to the ol’ blog. Besides posts about bacon, of course.

First, there’s this Inside Higher Ed article, “The Library Web Site of the Future” by Steven J. Bell. I can imagine this being handy for English 516 for the electronic library angle on things, but I can also imagine it being interesting for English 444 too. Most of the article is about how academic-types find most university library web sites/portals are not user-friendly and/or useful. I don’t know if I agree with that or not when it comes to EMU’s Halle Library web site, to be honest. I have always found it pretty easy to find journals and such through it– though oddly, there seems to be some glitches in the book catalog. Of course, part of my comfort-level with the library’s web site comes from the librarians: when I have questions, I ask; when I take students to the library for orientations about doing research in the library, I inevitably learn something myself. So maybe part of the “usability” part being left out of Bell’s article is the fact that most academics– certainly faculty but also students– don’t interact exclusively with the university library web site. Most of us manage to get over to the building once in a while to talk with actual librarians and occasionally touch actual books.

I did think this passage was kind of interesting though:

Several years ago academic institutions shifted control of their Web sites from technology wizards to marketing gurus. At the time there was backlash. The change in outlook was perceived as a corporate sellout, a philosophical transformation of the university Web site from candid campus snapshot to soulless advertiser of campus wares to those who would buy into the brand. I observed that academic librarians feared what the marketers wrought, and would resist efforts to let any advertising consultant or marketing vice-president take control of the library Web site. They might just make it more about marketing than connecting people to information.

I was one of the resisters. Now I think the marketing people got it right. The first thing librarians must do after ending the pretense that the library Web site succeeds in connecting people to content is understand how and why the institutional homepage has improved and what we can learn from it. Doing so will allow academic libraries to discover answers to that first question; how to create user community awareness about the electronic resources in which the institution heavily invests.

Of course, instead of just talking to the marketing people, the library-types could talk to people in academic programs interested in usability and web design… just sayin’….

The other thing I heard earlier today that I thought might be good to bring up in 516 at some point was a story on Michigan Public Radio about the Espresso Book Machine. It was actually on the “Environment Report” because the angle was on how these machines can save paper. The story also took the angle of how these machines would replace browsing for paperbacks in Borders or something, but that strikes me as unlikely. No, the real value of this sort of “on demand publishing” machine is clearly in academic publishing where the press runs are already pitifully small and expensive.

Quite frankly, I’m surprised there aren’t any academic publishers now using this technology; or am I wrong about that?

Amazon has released Kindle 2– or rather, they’ve released the opportunity to buy one (I’m not sure when they are actually going to be available). There was a NYTimes article about this last week.

Among other issues/controversies, it would seem the Authors Guild sees the new Kindle’s potential/ability to read text aloud is some kind of copyright violation. I like this response from Neil Gaiman about this via boing-boing. I also thought this article was interesting: “Why aren’t ebooks taking off? Not enough pirates,” which I found via Stephen’s Web. Very smart article, pointing out the differences between the music industry and the book industry when it comes to pirating and sharing of files. Besides the fact that it is a ton easier to “share” and/or pirate music than it is to do the same with a book, there are places right now “for sharing this information that’s wholly supported by the industry (you might know them as libraries).”

My friend Troy has a Kindle and absolutely loves it. In fact, I toyed with the idea of buying one myself back in November/December. I might try to get EMU to buy me one (it wouldn’t be easy to do though) because it really is something I’d like to have to demo in the classes I teach. Or who knows? Maybe a bunch of money and/or a Kindle will just fall on me from the sky.

At this stage, I’ll probably wait for a while. For one thing, since me and the Mrs. just got iPhones, I’m a little tapped-out right now gadget-wise. But the other thing that I want that I don’t think is quite there yet for the Kindle is the ability to handle PDFs well. Quite frankly, I don’t read that many of the kinds of books that are readily available for the Kindle. I do read a lot of academic stuff, particularly journal articles that are increasingly available in PDF format, or things for my teaching that I make available as a PDF and post on eReserves. So what would be very useful is if this thing would handle PDFs as well as Apple’s Preview does– allowing for highlighting, notes, etc. It’d be very nice to have all of these articles and chapters in PDF format for my teaching right there on one device instead of the mountain of paper I forget to file.

Oh, and maybe they should put a phone in this thing.

I’ve been spending my first day of the year kind of doing stuff around the house, running errands, doing laundry, watching Iowa pound the crap out of South Carolina in the Outback Bowl, and working on the materials for my grad class, English 516: Computers and Writing, Theory and Practice. It is a work in progress, though it is much more together than the rather blank schedule page on the site might suggest.

In any event, one of the assignments I have for the class is for students to do a book review of a recently published book that has something to do with the subject matter of the class. My current list of book options is up and running here; anybody out there in the comp/rhet world have any other ideas for possible readings?

The only two qualifications/requirements are it has to be some kind of book that has to do in some way with “computers and writing” (and that obviously could include a lot of different things), and it has to be a book that has come out recently (certainly nothing before 2004).