Technology – Page 13 – Steven D. Krause

May 9, 2009

The new Kindle as an eTextbook reader

A pretty interesting article in CHE I just skimmed: How a Student-Friendly Kindle Could Change the Textbook Market. It’s kind of interesting because it basically ends up focusing on all the various reasons why the eTextbook thing hasn’t worked so far and why the Kindle DX is not liable to fair much better. This passage seems to sum up things for me:

What the textbook industry needs is the equivalent of an iTunes store for e-books, say some experts, who note that sales of digital music never took off until Apple created the iPod and an easy-to-use online music marketplace. That’s why Amazon seems like a promising entrant.

Except for one thing: Publishers have already set up a digital store meant to serve as the iTunes of e-textbooks, and it has been slow to catch on. The online store, called CourseSmart, was started two years ago by the five largest textbook publishers. Now 12 publishers contribute content to the service, which offers more than 6,300 titles. The e-books are all designed to be read on laptops or desktops, rather than Kindles or other dedicated e-book reading devices.

One problem for CourseSmart has been a lack of awareness by both students and professors that the service even exists.

“I’ve never heard of that,” said David K. Belsky, a graduate student at the State University of New York at Albany who started a Facebook group calling for cheaper textbook options. He has heard about Amazon’s plans for a new Kindle for textbooks, but he said he isn’t likely to invest in one. “I already have my laptop, and there’s only so many things you can carry,” he said, adding that he regularly types notes during class on his laptop. “I wouldn’t sit there taking notes on a Kindle, that’s for sure.”

I like that the Kindle DX is bigger and can render PDFs better. For my purposes, which basically are to load it up with the readings I teach, this could be a good thing. But at $500, I think I want to kind of wait a bit. I mean, for that kind of money, I might as well wait and see if Apple comes up with some kind of Mediapad that doesn’t require Verizon and/or that lets me choose a service provider.

But I digress.

This could be a good article to teach in 516.

May 1, 2009

I would have gone to this conference…

… if I had known about it, and if I had the money. Too big “ifs.” But the Media in Transition conference looks like it was pretty cool; the theme was “Stone and Papyrus, Storage and Transmission,” and it looks like a lot of the papers and presentations are linked to this web site. I’m running around like a headless chicken getting ready for the spring term, but the next time I get fifteen or 20 minutes, I’ll take a look at this for sure.

April 29, 2009

Upgrading the office and (unexpectedly) the computer

It seems like I move my office/desk space about once every two years. Maybe that is some sort of subconscious/unconscious response to life; maybe it’s just instinct, like migration. Or maybe, more reasonably in this case at least, it’s just in response to events and the way the house was being used.

As I mentioned a couple weeks ago, we have this study/loft kind of space in our house where Annette had set up her desk. But because she does her work in the living room, dining room table, coffee shops, etc. (in other words, anywhere but at her desk), this really nice space was largely a place for her to store stuff. So I convinced her to let me move out of the basement (aka “the man cave”) and into the light.

Since we’re between winter and spring terms around here, this seemed like a good time to make the move. I underestimated the impact of rearranging, particularly how long it would take. Moving into this space first meant moving stuff out of here into other rooms, which caused other things to move, and before you know it, I was rearranging half the house. And then there was moving about a ton of books a couple of flights of stairs, which definitely worked my gluts yesterday.

And just to throw another wrench into the works, my three year old iMac had what I would equate to a major stroke. Basically, just as I was setting it up on my new desk, the processor and video started going wacky. I am fairly confident that it was just a coincidence that this happened while moving stuff around (in hindsight, it was easy enough to remember a couple of kind of bizarre crashes and the like), but I have to wonder if that computer just did not like the sunlight in the new office. The good news is I was able to boot into target disk mode and the hard drive was/is fine; the bad news is that the diagnosis at the Apple store was that fixing the logic board/video would probably come close to $1000. So, seeing that price-point, I went ahead and bought the iMac on my new desk.

I might have been able to limp along with the old iMac because it was not completely dead. Just now, I was able to reboot it and do some software rig-a-ma-roll and get to iTunes to deauthorize that computer so I can use iTunes on this new computer. Who knows? Maybe it could have been/could still be fixed for less. But just dealing with my iTunes account was a strain on its poor rattled computer brain. Besides the wonky screen (lines, whole chunks just dropping away or getting warped, etc.), it froze completely after five minutes, forcing me to reboot it again. So while I wasn’t crazy about buying a new computer right now, I think I made the right choice.

It’s weird because I’ve had Apple computers for almost 25 years now, and while I’ve had some laptops crash and burn on me, I’ve never had a problem with a desktop unit. I’ve got two desktop computers in my office, an iMac maybe a year older than the one I just replaced and one of those “Lamp-style” iMacs that’s probably 5 or 6 years old. Both of these computers are servers and are on 24/7, and both are trucking along just fine. I’ve got a couple of G4 laptops (one of which was repaired several years ago) and both of them still work, though they are slow and clunky in comparison to what’s available nowadays. So I guess I’m going to chalk this failure up to just one of those things.

So far, I like the new desktop set-up a lot. I boosted the RAM up to 4 GB and the processor is noticeably faster. The keyboard is too little, but I think the Apple store people are going to be cool with me swapping it out for a numbered keyboard. I’m backing up with Time Machine over the wifi to a 1.5 TB drive I bought so everyone in the house can back stuff up as needed– since we already had a base station, this was a significantly cheaper option than Time Capsule– and that seems to be working well. And hey, there’s actually this non-cave-like light in the room! Go figure!

April 26, 2009April 26, 2009

Misc. Post on the end of the school year

I wrapped up my winter 2009 term yesterday; here are some miscellaneous thoughts on the school year that was:

I taught a full load this year, which in my department is three courses a term. Last year, when I was on quasi-sabbatical, I taught one course. The year before that, when I was both the writing program coordinator and the acting director of first year writing, I taught two courses, one each term. The year before that, when I was just the writing program coordinator, I taught two courses each term. In other words, I’ve taught almost as much this last school year as I did the previous three.
Not that I’m complaining, mind you. My classes are a lot smaller than the classes most of my lit colleagues teach, and I like teaching more than I like release time administrating. I think. I don’t think there’s a lot of difference in terms of work-load, but there is definitely a different kind of rhythm to “just teaching.”
In the fall, I taught all on-campus for the first time in quite a while. It was interesting to think of the similarities and differences between face to face teaching and online teaching. I was reminded of a presentation I saw once at the CCCCs a long time ago where some computers and writing big-shot (his name escapes me right now, but I think he has since retired– I’m not sure) gave a presentation about how not teaching in a computer lab for the first time in a long time. Among other things, he felt like he became “the server” because he was collecting and hauling around all this paper from his students. And I was also reminded of the section in Steve Johnson’s book Everything Bad is Good for You when he hypothesizes about what people would think of the book if it came after video games. In any event, one of the ideas that’s been rattling around my head all year is a Chronicle of Higher Education or Inside Higher Ed-like article where I talk about the same thing with online teaching. The criticism/critique of teaching online is always “you can’t do ‘x’ in an online class the same way you can do it in a face to face class;” but what I kept thinking about last fall was how I couldn’t or wouldn’t do ‘y’ in my face to face class the same way I could in my online class, if that makes sense.
I had students in both English 328 and in English 516 make movies of different types this year. The 328 students worked in small groups to make a short movie and then they each wrote essays about the experience. I learned lots and lots from the experience. What I found most interesting about the movie making for the 328 class was that as a collaborative project, it more or less worked the same in both the face to face classes and online classes. In the face to face classes, I had students get into groups to make the movies, gave them some time and help when the asked for it, and pretty much turned them loose onto it. Some groups got right down to business, some mostly stood around pointing fingers at each other about who’s responsible for not getting things done, and most groups were somewhere in-between. In the online classes, I had some groups get right down to business, some blame each other, and most somewhere in-between. Students who really were “distant” (and out of two 20 student sections of 328, I only had three or four students who really were a long ways away) tended to be the script writers, and I’m hoping to find ways to get them more involved in the actual production with other tools like taskbarn.
For 516, I had students make movies as book review presentations. This is something I have been doing in the online version of the class for the last couple years, but for those classes, I let students off the hook by letting them use things like PowerPoint with sound files attached and by not having any real time limits. This time around, I specifically said they could not use PowerPoint and they had to be 10 minutes or less. But just like the online version of the class, I didn’t give these students any instruction on how to do this– more or less, I told them to go and figure it out. Well, almost no instruction; we did have one evening session where students spent about an hour working together to make a little movie right there in class, the point being that the available technology makes this really easy to do nowadays. Plus I did work with a number of students to get their projects to work. So given my “hands off” (mostly) approach to teaching this and my relatively low expectations, I was pretty much blown away by the quality of these presentations. As you can see from this link to the category of book reviews from the class blog/site, some videos are obviously better than others, but some of these are really quite good. This idea for 516 is a keeper for me.
I like the projects for 328 I have now, including the collaborative movie and essay about it, but I did very much miss having my 328 students keep web sites where they posted their essays. I had a particularly hard time all year trying to convince students about the need to write for an audience beyond just the teacher, and I have to wonder if any of that is this lack of a truly public space where they post writing. Or it could just be my imagination. In any event, I’m thinking about having students keep WordPress.com blogs because WordPress has the distinct advantage over Blogger of allowing for static pages, meaning students could still post the assigned blog writings to the ongoing “blog part” of things while posting finished/revised drafts of essay projects to static pages on the site. I’d have to change some instructions on blogging, but I don’t know if WordPress.com is that much harder than Blogger is nowadays.
I had a kind of a troubling email exchange with a grad student this year; for obvious reasons, I’m not going to post any details about that. But the incident did make me reflect a bit on some of the downsides of the “student-centered classroom” and/or empowering students– particularly graduate students– in certain ways. I don’t have any of these kinds of problems with about 97% of my students, of course; but that 3% can cause troubles and that stick in my mind.

Most of the time, the small amount of problems I have are pretty much harmless; for example, I can think of times when I’ve laid out some sort of activity for a class– say a small group activity or a peer review or something like that– and then a student says “I think I have a better idea about how we should do this.” Um… well, I am sometimes open to these kinds of suggestions, but no, probably not, because I usually plan this stuff out in advance. Sometimes, when the student thinks of themselves more as a “colleague” than a student (usually an older student and/or a grad student who is also a teacher as a graduate assistant, at a community college, or at a high school), this can become kind of problematic to say the least because, well, we’re not really colleagues.

And sometimes, this sense of empowerment/entitlement can cross the line into a sort of weird student “bullying” of the teacher. I’m not talking about a student questioning a grade, though I suppose that completely legitimate conversation can cross over to bullying. I’m talking about a space where a student feels so empowered and entitled to get in the teacher’s “face,” usually metaphorically, in order to get her or his way. You know, a bully. Maybe a student bullies the teacher because they feel overly empowered (consciously or not) by a sort of warped idea that the student-centered classroom means that the student ought to get whatever he or she wants. Maybe it’s a part of the “student as customer” culture. Maybe some people are just jerks.

Like I said, these are very rare problems and I don’t want to dwell on this too much. I had some fantastic students this year, I really did. But it’s funny how that one or two really mean students stick with you.

Anyway, that is the school year that was, and now it’s time for spring/summer break. Not that this means it’s time for a “break,” really; I am teaching in the spring term starting May 1, I’ve got a ton of other writing projects to get on, and there’s a whole bunch stuff to do around the house. But you get the idea.

April 19, 2009

Some charts look like a pie and you know that’s sweet

Via boing-boing on a blog reading break comes this handy visual rhetoric reference:

Now back to the grading grading grading….

April 14, 2009

Disney plagiarizing itself?

A fun video from boing-boing that might be interesting to show in 516 next year:

April 9, 2009

“Professor Encourages Students to Pass Notes During Class — via Twitter”

I found this via a Facebook post by Nels Highberg, “Professor Encourages Students to Pass Notes During Class — via Twitter.” Here’s the opening paragraph:

Cole W. Camplese, director of education-technology services at Pennsylvania State University at University Park, prefers to teach in classrooms with two screens — one to project his slides, and another to project a Twitter stream of notes from students. He knows he is inviting distraction — after all, he’s essentially asking students to pass notes during class. But he argues that the additional layer of communication will make for richer class discussions.

Camplese started this first with a 20 student grad class, and while it took a while to catch on, he says, and one of his goal with this encouraged and systematic “back channel” communication is to disrupt the traditional classroom lecture/discussion model.

Maybe this is a good experiment, and it is something I will certainly bring up the next time I teach English 516. But I doubt this is going to catch on in my department. There is a movement here– a mini-movement, but a movement nonetheless– to have a departmental policy against laptop use in classes. It’s a confusing and odd policy for all sorts of different reasons, and it would be at the discretion of the instructor. In other words, students in my classes could still use their laptops. Anyway, my point is this mini-movement suggests to me that there might be a few folks not quite ready for a Twitter-hosted back channel discussion.

All this reminds me that one of these days, I think I might have to learn a bit more about the Twitter….

April 8, 2009

CCCC Web editing, part 2 (or 3?)

Strangely, I received another email about the CCC Online and CCCC MemberWeb. Though my sense is I am not the only one who got this not very personal email from Chuck Bazerman. Here it is, in its entirety:

April 8, 2009

Dear Steven Krause,

We need your vision and commitment to lead us into our next stage of networked engagement. We are looking to fill two web editing positions, as listed below.

* The position of CCC Online Editor focuses on publication, and will coordinate closely with Kathi Yancey the CCC print edition editor.
* The MemberWeb Editor is concerned more with creating new ways for CCCC members to collaborate and stay in touch with others with common interests. This position will be parallel to similar positions for the other conferences of NCTE.

Both positions will receive technical support from the NCTE office; we are looking more for your vision, communicative skills, and commitment than we are for technical skills. Visit the call for applications for further details.

I hope either or both of these positions will be of interest to you, and we look forward to seeing your application.

Best,

Chuck Bazerman
CCCC Chair

Anyone else out there get this letter? I’m sort of curious what list I am on to be receiving this.

Anyway, here was my response:

Dear Chuck Bazerman, CCCC Chair:

Thanks for your email, but a) I already was invited and declined this invitation, and b) I’ve written about this in some detail on my blog, http://stevendkrause.com/2009/03/01/ncteccc-online-web-editor-positions-or-i-still-dont-think-they-quite-get-the-internets-and-that-worries-me/

Best,

–Steve

Somehow, I am not expecting a reply….

April 1, 2009

ReReRe: CCCC-ing, part 3 (The “CCC(C)s Sux” or a similiarly provocative title and subject)

Nope, not an April fools joke, I’m afraid….

In English 516 the other night, we talked about proposal for the upcoming CCCCs in Louisville, close enough to EMU for a car drive and a cheap hotel for some of our interested grad students. One of the students made reference to this post of mine about the weirdness surrounding the call for various editors of the CCCs online. Bradley Dilger mentioned that post on his blog here, and of course Collin Brooke has written about the work he did on his blog (here, for example). And if I wanted to add the “Conference” C to the conversation, I could take the angle I took in this post back in August.

Anyway, I half-jokingly said to my class that I might try to propose a panel called something like “The CCC(C)s Sux: Radically Rethinking the Conference and the Journal,” or something like that. What I’m imagining here are presentations (or a roundtable?) where presenters take up one issue of something that has gone terribly wrong with the conference and/or the journal over the last decade or so, and to propose a radical solution. For example, let’s close down the print version of the journal. Let’s make all presentations online. Let’s re-examine/re-expose the presentation review process and talk about the extent to which “sexy titles” win the day over content. Or whatever.

There are a lot of sucky things about the CCC(C)s that could work here.

One of my students said that there is no way such a panel called “The CCC(C)s Sux” would get accepted. On the contrary, I said. I think that the reviewers for the CCCCs would actually be more than willing to embrace a panel about the CCCCs sucking in the name of promoting the views of “other voices,” to be fair and balanced, to be open to change, etc. And if they didn’t accept such a proposal, well, then I and my fellow presenters would have yet more evidence that NCTE/CCCC is not truly able to revisit, rethink, revise, and/or renew the way that it does things, the proverbial “see, I told you so!” satisfaction.

Any takers?