Category: Technology

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Google Reader Boo-Boo

I use Google Reader as my RSS feed reader, though I will certainly be careful to not use its latest feature, which allows users to mark particular things as articles to share with each and every person on your contact list, regardless of who that person is– friend, work colleague, or, in my case, one of the hundreds of people who I email about something having to do with our writing program. As this user said, quoted in this article, “Google Reader Making More Enemies Than Friends,” “What genius at Google thought that this same list, consisting of hundreds of people from all sorts of parts of my life, would be the same list I’d want to share my Reader entries with?”

The article goes on to make the connection with the problems Facebook had with Beacon (which I never used personally but which also shared a bit too much), and for me, both of these things suggest two closely related things. First, contrary to a lot of concerns from various privacy folks, many– maybe most– users of services like Google Reader and Facebook are savvy enough to realize that there are things that they don’t want to share with just everyone. I think about this with Facebook frequently enough, and certainly with my own blogging habits. And second, there is a line out there– fuzzy though it may be— which, if crossed, users will raise flags and backlash against companies like Google and Facebook. So far, these providers have been willing to respond to those customer needs, too.

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MacArthur Series on Digital Media and Learning

Via danah boyd, I’ve learned that the John D. and Catherine MacArthur Foundation of a series of books out on Digital Media and Learning, and, better yet, the articles in these edited collections are available for free here. I will have to do some browsing, but I think my timing in discovering these pieces is pretty good– I’m trying to put together as much of a syllabus/reading list for English 516 as I can before I get out of town for the holidaze. This, combined with some good advice I got from tech-rhet the other day, might just about do it.

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If you're looking for an online grad course in computers and writing….

… I thought I’d throw out the the chance for folks looking for grad school credit and/or a course in computers and writing to sign up for the class I’m scheduled to teach for winter term, English 516: Computers and Writing, Theory and Practice. There’s a description here; anyone really interested can email me at stevendkrause at gmail dot com.

It’s been kind of a weird late fall/early winter around here. EMU students have been traditionally slow to register for winter (what everyone else calls spring) term classes, mostly because even in the best of times, our students need to settle their accounts for fall before they can register for winter, and they often don’t register until right before Christmas or right before the semester starts in early January. But nowadays, the economy in southeast Michigan is in poor shape, and I think that and other things are having an impact.

Right now, it looks to me like my class has enough students to “make,” but I would just as soon run this class full or over-loaded, and it occurred to me that there might be a few folks out there who might either be interested themselves or know someone. I know that EMU graduate students not in the writing program can take the course with the instructor’s permission; I don’t know how it would work for someone not at EMU, but I’m sure we could make it work and it would potentially be a fun/cool experience for one and all.

Anyway, like I said, if you’re interested, let me know.

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NPR story about online courses (and weird hours)

I caught the tail-end of this story on today’s “Morning Edition,” “Online courses catch on in U.S. colleges.” I liked a lot of what I heard; they were focusing on an online English program at the University of Illinois-Springfield; I don’t know what software they use or anything like that (maybe I will when I read/listen to the whole story), but there is apparently a synchronous component to these classes, too.

I’ll probably link to it/assign it in English 516 this coming term, but I guess I have two slight reservations with the piece. First off, the title: haven’t online courses “caught on” at colleges/universities for a while now? Is this really something new? And second, this paragraph:

For professors, the growth of e-learning has meant a big shift in the way they deal with students.

Take professor Sara Cordell of the University of Illinois-Springfield: Her day doesn’t end at 6 p.m., as it does for some college professors.

I suspect that few college professors’ days end at 6 p.m. It’s not that college professors work long and hard hours; that’s true, but I don’t want to exaggerate that. But I think it is universally true that college professors work strange hours. In my department, just about every faculty member teaches at least one night class. So one day, you’re at home all day, half-working on school stuff (scholarship, grading, answering email, doing stuff online, etc., etc.) and half-working on home life stuff, and another day, you’re in the office for 12 hours. One day, you’re in at 9 am and out by 2 pm, and another day you’re in at 2 pm and not out until 10 pm.

A minor complaint (about the story– I prefer the weird hours, personally), but there you have it.

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Yes, but did they ever read?

This story was on NPR’s “All Things Considered” last night, “Reading Study Shows Remarkable Decline in U.S.” The gist of it is that all kinds of people (kids, adults, etc.) aren’t reading as much as they used to read and the dang internets and other technologies are to blame.

I think the story was compelling and worthy listening and all that. Still, stories like this remind me of the piece that Tom Standage wrote for WIRED a couple of years ago, which, among other things, critiqued the dance “the waltz” as being the fall of civilization:

“The indecent foreign dance called the Waltz was introduced … at the English Court on Friday last … It is quite sufficient to cast one’s eyes on the voluptuous inter�twining of the limbs, and close com�pressure of the bodies … to see that it is far indeed removed from the modest reserve which has hitherto been considered distinctive of English females. So long as this obscene display was con�fined to prostitutes and adulteresses, we did not think it deserving of notice; but now that it is … forced on the respectable classes of society by the evil example of their superiors, we feel it a duty to warn every parent against exposing his daughter to so fatal a contagion.”

I mean, I am just old enough to lament the decline of reading of print/”words in the row” books, and I am just enough of a parent to want my 10 year old son to read some “good books” once in a while. But goodness, it is so so easy and so pleasurable to wallow in the failings of the young. Too easy and pleasurable, which gives me pause.

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Where is Kindle going?

I’m listening to NPR right now and listening to Jeff Bezos talking about the new Kindle, the latest in electronic reading devices. I dunno. Several years ago, I thought this sort of device would replace textbooks. Now, I’m not sure who will want one of these things.

Without actually seeing one, the problems I see with this include:

  • At $400, way too expensive.
  • No color.
  • No browser (at least I think that’s the case).
  • Suppose I want to buy a book that is not in the kindle store; how would that work?
  • I’m going to guess that most of the books I would read (particularly academic ones) aren’t going to be in this format anytime soon. I’m also going to guess the same is true for most of the blogs that I read, too.

But hey, what do I know? There might be one under every Christmas tree this year. See their video demo if you’re curious; and this might be something that will fit into ENGL 516….

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"At the heard of the writers strike, a tangled web"

I’m doing a little web surfing this morning before getting ready for the NCTE– perhaps the last time I’ll be online on this trip since I don’t expect to be back here until later tonight, and since I’d have to pay another $10 for internet access for that time, I think I’ll probably wait to post any thoughts about the conference until Saturday night from home.

In any event, while surfing, I came across this article from the Chicago Tribune, “At the heart of the writers strike, a tangled Web.” It’s interesting stuff to me as a writer and a “technology guy,” and I can imagine that this strike will be something worthy of study in the future. Here’s a quote:

As the screenwriter Phil Alden Robinson (“Field of Dreams”) says in an explanatory video at United Hollywood (unitedhollywood.blogspot.com), a quasi-official strike blog, “This is our generation’s moment.”

The writers union gave in to producers and took a pay cut when royalty rates for home-video sales were being negotiated in the 1980s, he says, and it was a huge mistake to compromise merely because it was an unproven business. Now, the issue is another fledgling business, the Internet, threatening to again change the means by which people get their entertainment.

“I don’t want, 30 years from now, writers looking back at us, saying, ‘What were these clowns thinking about? How could they not know that the digital revolution was everything?’ ” Robinson says.

But now I gotta get ready for the teacher-type gig.

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The Dvorak 'zine/comic

This is great:

Via this boing boing entry comes this link to DVzine.org’s The Dvorak zine, which is a great comic making an impassioned plea to use the more efficient and logical typing keyboard design developed by a guy named Dvorak. Besides tapping into my geeky love of all sorts of different writing technologies and my enjoyment of comics, it strikes me as the kind of thing that could be good to incorporate into some teaching.

The comments on the boing boing post are kind of interesting, too. Basically, the folks posting here who converted to Dvorak liked it and found it more comfortable, but they didn’t typically type any faster. It’s good to learn that just about any computer can be converted to Dvorak for practice though.

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Catching up on a boatload of online readings

I have about 15 tabs open in my browser with things I have been meaning to read and/or blog about. I don’t want to spend a lot of time on this now, so here’s a whole bunch of stuff that might be useful and/or interesting later, mostly in terms of teaching but some scholarship, too: