Category: Sabbatical Lite

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Email advice (and the strange absence of teaching)

Via boing boing, I learned about this, “Write a perfect email,” on the Wired How To Wiki. It’s solid advice, and even though it strikes me as simplistic and common sense to the extreme, I know this is something I will pass along to students in my classes. In fact, I created a document similar to this a few years ago, “How to Send Krause Email.” I’ve been using it in my teaching, particularly my online teaching, for a while now, and it has been pretty effective. I assign it as reading early in classes. If a student sends me an email that is way outside the boundaries of these rules, I send the student a link to this little set of instructions. It’s surprising, but it really does seem to make a difference.

Ah, teaching. That is one of the strange things about the sabbatical lite experience so far. I’m still doing some light administrative work that has so far taken the form of a lot of emails and phone calls, but things next week will start getting geared up with meetings and such. So, for better or worse, I am still very much engaged in the daily life of the university and the department. On the other hand, I’m supposed to be working on scholarship things instead of teaching things. I say “I’m supposed to be” because this week, I have spent a great deal of time painting the front of my house, a project that is more or less weather sensitive: it will be too cold to paint sooner than later. And much of what I’ve been doing for the last couple days has had to do with a party we’re having to celebrate the publication of my wife’s book. But I digress.

Anyway, I guess what I am experiencing is what has to be a common sabbatical experience, which is the strange absence of actually teaching as part of my job. I’ve pretty much been teaching every fall for almost 20 years (I’m including my graduate school experiences here), so to just not do that for a term like this has been kind of odd. Not at all bad, I should point out– it’s nice to have a bit of a break. But it’s still strange, and I think that strangeness actually isn’t helping me in terms of scholarship.

Of course, I should probably get back to these sabbatical lite projects….

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A couple more teaching kinds of links

Gee, maybe I am thinking about teaching too much. Of course, I had at one point planned on writing a book about the history of different writing technologies, so both of these links are still quasi Sabbatical Lite like.

  • The Classic Typewriter Page, which I found via boing boing and which is maintained by someone who teaches philosophy at Xavier U. Cool stuff.
  • Johndan’s work/space blog had this cool link here to a site on “The History of The Discovery of Cinematography,” but it appears that that site (not Johndan’s, the other one) is now gone. Well, maybe it’ll be back….
  • From Canada’s Globe and Mail comes “Researchers question school in high-tech age.” Basically, the folks being interviewed here ask what’s the point of the conventional classroom at all when it could all be done electronically. It’s a bit over-the-top, but I do think this passage is largely true:

    “It’s pre-Gutenberg,” says Don Tapscott, futurist, lecturer and author of bestsellers such as “Wikinomics,” laughing as he recalls the assessment he heard from a university president.

    “It’s a prof working from handwritten notes. The students are all writing it down and the prof is writing on a blackboard. The assumption of the printing press is not even a fundamental part of the learning paradigm.”

    Dentists, doctors and other professionals asleep for 100 years would awake, he says, to a world where they would not recognize their jobs, much less perform them. But in education, a teacher could walk into a classroom after a century and get busy.

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Syllabi envy (sorta)

This is the first beginning of the school year in 19 years in which I have not had to worry about preparing a syllabus or two or three. It’s kind of strange, though not a completely unwelcome break from the routine of my life. While I’m adjusting to that and pretending to get work done, I thought I’d link to Alex Halavais’ “Two new courses” post, where he posts a couple syllabi for his upcoming term. A couple of thoughts based on my very quick read:

  • I like some of the language that he has in his “Introduction to Interactive Communication” syllabus about what it’s “like” to be a graduate student, and it might be worthwhile for me to lift/rework some of that language for my own graduate teaching.
  • This “Intro to Interactive Communication” syllabus reminds me of the ven diagram experience of rhetoric in an English department versus rhetoric in a communications department/school/program. I took a grad course years ago in modern (e.g., 20th century) rhetorical theory that included a few PhD students from my program, a few from other programs associated with culture studies at Bowling Green State, and, of course, with grad students in communications. Most of the theorist we read overlapped– Richard Weaver, Perlman, Toulmin, Foucault, Burke, etc. But every once in a while, the communications PhD students would mention someone and us English comp/rhet PhD students would say “who is that?” and the communications PhD students (and the communications professor, generally speaking) would say “you don’t know who ‘so-and-so’ is?” Or we’d mention someone like Sharon Crowley or James Berlin, and they’d all say “who is that?”
  • The second course, “Virtual Worlds,” seem to largely be about Second Life. I’m sure that Alex will make it a fine experience, but so far, I haven’t had the patience to deal with the Second Life experience. Maybe if I spent a bit more time, or maybe, now that I have a much better computer than the last time I tried it, it might be worthwhile. And I can easily imagine a scenario in which something like this is useful for online teaching. But that’s a different topic than what I’m supposed to be working on this year.
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Blog communities, rules, lessons, and BAWS

I’ve had a particularly unproductive (blogs as writerly spaces project-wise) couple of weeks. This week, much of my lack of productivity has to do with much welcomed family fun, but that’s a whole different issue I’ll post about soon on my unofficial blog. But last week, I was obsessing over the conversation on EMUTalk.org that started to turn kind of ugly. The short version is that when the EMU email system crashed for a week, people who use this system were pissed off, and the ICT people weighed in. Some where helpful, some could not really understand what the big deal was, and some were just, um, jerks.

I guess I did get some useful BAWS oriented lessons out of the whole thing though. This outburst was really just one of several over the last 10 months of the site, and it prompted me to do something that I should have done a long time ago: write up some rules. These rules were largely based on other rules that I found at other places, and particularly useful was the Blogging Wikia project (specifically, the Code of Conduct project on this site), along with the codes of conduct from a few other community-oriented blogs.
Continue reading “Blog communities, rules, lessons, and BAWS”

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What it might look like if people who hate social networking got together

Via TechCrunch comes “NOSO,” or “No Social,” a relief from the social networking experience. The video on the site explains the details, but basically, the NOSO is a way to organize a group of people who agree to make no connections and to disengage from their various Web 2.0 networks for a set period of time.

Obviously, it’s a bit of a goofy art project. Still, as someone who has found himself rather distracted from his scholarship by online events this last week, a little NOSO-ing might not be a bad idea.

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Man with a Movie Camera project

Via Cheryl Ball’s post on Tech-Rhet comes this project, a remake of Man With a Movie Camera. Basically, the project asks for folks to re-shoot scenes from this movie, which is a 1929 experimental/documentary film I had never heard of before (which perhaps proves the fact that I am not really a film scholar). Conveniently, the original is available at the project site in the form of a google video.

I’m not sure if there’s any way I could use this in my teaching, and I’m not completely sure I should even if I could. This seems to me to fall into that fuzzy space of not exactly writing, even though writing includes a lot of different things. I could go on and on about this, and I did write an article about these questions in 2004. I’m not sure I still agree with the arguments I made back then, but at the same time, this probably isn’t something that would fit well in anything I teach.

On the other hand, this might be a fun thing to try on my own. I’ve got my FlipVideo camera (not to mention access to the English department’s super-nice camera), and it might make for a fun little side-project during sabbatical lite. Of course, I’m getting more and more of these side projects….

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Advice for the new assistant professor; thoughts on being a new professor

Just browsing Inside Higher Ed this morning, I read through this article “Surviving the first year” by Shari Dinkins, and by “first year,” she means the first year of a faculty person on the tenure-track. It’s all good advice, though if I had to pick two– okay, three– highlights from the piece, it would be “don’t fall into one camp right away” (meaning be careful how quickly you politically identify with one group or another), “STFU” (meaning that the new person needs to hold their tongues a bit), and “Prepare for a deeper level of commitment” (meaning that there is a big difference between being a full-time adjunct and a tenure-track faculty person– Dinkins describes it as the difference between “just dating” and being engaged).

I suppose that means I’m married to the institution at this point….

Anyway, I’m starting this school year as a newly promoted full professor. As I’ve mentioned here before, that is not as big of a deal as it is at many other schools– certainly tier 1 research schools– because everyone at EMU who manages to get tenure and who continues to have something resembling a pulse gets promoted to professor. That low standard and the general blues/bad budgets hitting EMU makes my promotion and current state a very mixed bag indeed. On the one hand, “it’s good to be the king,” it does mean something to have seniority, and the pay raise is nice. On the other hand, it doesn’t mean as much here since it’s a promotion everyone can be expected to receive, it’s the last pay raise I’m ever likely to receive, and it makes any more mobility to another institution all that more difficult. And given the metaphoric and literal shit that has hit the fan at EMU in the last year (an ugly faculty strike, a meddling board of regents, a murder cover-up followed by a weird media blitz by the ex EMU president, and, most recently, a series of very deep and troubling budget cuts), I’ve been thinking about mobility lately.

The truth is that leaving EMU would be difficult. Besides all kinds of complications being a full professor applying for a less than that level job, I’m part of an academic couple and a commuter marriage is not on the table. And complicating the matter even more is the fact that we live near the epicenter of the collapse of the sub-prime mortgage debacle means that our chances of selling our house and not losing way too much money seems unlikely. Oh, and besides all that: if I were to leave EMU at the end of this year while I am on sabbatical, I’d have to pay EMU half my salary back. That ain’t gonna happen.

So, like I said, it’s a mixed bag. It is nice to feel empowered and secure, but it’s not as nice to feel stuck.

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A word about the unpleasant EMU news of late…

Here I am, just beginning with Sabbatical Lite, and already I am feeling out of whack.

Most obviously, I and everyone else at EMU has been following the recent news of the president, the chief of campus police, and the VP of student affairs getting fired/”separated” from EMU. It’s a little discombobulating to hear the story I’ve been hearing/repeating on campus and at EMUtalk.org (the campus/community oriented blog I started running last September) for months now showing up on CNN, Fox News, in the New York Times, in the UK’s Guardian Unlimited, and 500-600 other outlets, according to news.google.com.

For folks coming here for more info on this– either regular readers or folks who found me on a web search– I would encourage you to take a look at EMUtalk.org in general, and perhaps at this post, “To first time EMUtalk.org readers/searchers about “Laura Dickinson Murder.” On this page, there’s a link to the category on EMUtalk.org “Dickinson Murder,” which has 64 different posts beginning on December 15, 2006 when the rumor of a dead girl in the dorms turned out to be true.

There’s only two things I’ll add here. First, the basic news story that has appeared in the national/international press recently basically summarizes the story well enough, though there are obviously a lot of other details. It’s been a topic of discussion on EMUtalk.org since December, and very heated discussion since late February when a suspect was arrested and when it suddenly became clear that Dickinson’s death was not “just one of those things” but a murder, and that murder had been covered up.

Second, I think the thing that is most frustrating to me personally and, simultaneously, most interesting about this to me professionally, is that all of this was easily avoided with some simple and clear communication skills. I won’t go into it all right now, but the various reports and investigations suggest that the players involved who came up with the “no foul play is suspected” line that was the seed of the administrative cover-up were working with almost zero actual information about what happened and that the line was more or less a toss-off line to round out a very short web statement/press release. “No foul play is suspected” was as much as anything a sloppy sentence written by a PR person (and apparently approved by Fallon) simply to close out a paragraph, not unlike other toss-off lines like “In society today” or “In conclusion” or something.

Then, after this toss-off and inaccurate line (and I say “inaccurate” because the investigation into the cover-up makes it clear that “foul play” was always suspected by the police investigating the crime) was allowed to go forward, no one in the upper-levels of EMU administration felt the need to correct this. And to be perfectly honest, it isn’t completely clear to me if this did not happen because the principles involved– President John Fallon, VP for Student Affairs Jim Vick, and/or Police Chief Cindy Hall (all now “former” in these roles)– did not want the message corrected for misguided PR and/or investigation reasons, of if these people were just not competent. Fallon, btw, is claiming as his defense that he just didn’t know what was going on, and there have been some cryptic suggestions in the latest reports that he’s got some kind of story to tell and that he was fired because he was about to do something that would have been very bad for EMU. I don’t know, strange.

Anyway, the point I’m trying to get at here is this: I think there is little doubt that Vick and Hall got fired because they tried to cover up a murder in the dorms, either because they didn’t want the bad PR or because they just didn’t know what they were doing, and that Fallon was fired because his defense of not knowing what was going on is about as problematic as actively participating in a cover-up. At the same time, it seems to me that a lot of this mess is also simple the result of sloppy writing and thinking, a terrible misreading of audience, and the lack of willingness to revise. Had someone– anyone– at some point gotten to the powers that be and successfully convinced them that EMU should have corrected the “no foul play suspected” line, none of this would have happened. Had someone published on the web site or elsewhere a statement like “We can’t say for sure there was no foul play involved. We’re investigating, and in the mean-time, everyone ought to review basic personal safety information,” etc., etc., this would have never become national news, and none of these people would have lost their jobs.

There’s always the what ifs though.

Besides this most public distraction, there are some departmental distractions too, things I will not go into right now, and some major budget cuts coming about soon. This puts me potentially into an odd place in terms of my sabbatical lite. On the one hand, my own work is inevitably being interrupted by these distractions (I suppose this post is evidence of that), in part because being the writing program coordinator (among other things) means I can’t just ignore these problems. On the other hand, I have already said I’m going to consciously not get “too involved” in some of these departmental distractions because of my writing and research plans. It’s probably too early to tell, but I think this has a chance of working.

In any event, I feel like this post might help me get some of this unpleasant news out of my head and maybe help me think about how to frame my sabbatical lite plans in the long-term. In the short term though, I think I had better get on to the scholarly/BAWS plan I had for the day: organizing my desk/office space a bit.

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Misc. Readings from "Up North"

While I was on vacation with family last week (the curious can read a few things about it here), I did do a little light blog reading, in part with the help of the off-line function for Google Reader. I don’t think I’ve quite figured out how to use it correctly, but I did manage to star a few items that I thought I’d mention here:

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"Happy Blogiversary," from WSJ.com

Just as I am ready to get back from vacation and ease into quasi-sabbatical mode, I stumbled across this article, “Happy Blogiversary,” from the WSJ.com. It is a pretty good and rather long article that spells out the “state of affairs” of blogging, at least from the point of view of a rather conservative newspaper about the world of business. This is certainly something that would be useful to teach a variety of different classes for sure.

Actually, it’s one of those articles that, in relationship to my “Blogs as Writerly Spaces” project, I find simultaneously really helpful and really intimidating. It’s helpful because it features a number of famous and semi-famous folks– bloggers and not– talking about why they read/write blogs, and it includes some interesting history. But it’s intimidating because it is one of those articles that, in very basic terms, probably sums up the point I’m trying to make with this project. And if my project can be summed up in a WSJ article, well, is my sabbatical project really a project?

These are normal doubts and misgivings at the beginning of a big project like this, I suppose. It feels a little like working on my dissertation. I recall going through these oscillations where I felt like my diss was literally about everything and therefore impossible, and/or that my diss was common sense and therefore irrelevant. I suspect this project will take some similar turns.

Oh well. I’m just easing into this project. The first things I’m going to do is read and clean my desk, so it’ll be a while before I have to doubt myself too much.