… and I don’t know where to put it now, I’ll put it here:
The Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography, which appears to be just that.
Easter Blog Reading/Web Reading Round-Up
It’s been a while since I’ve had a chance to just read/browse some blogs and web sites. Even though I have a mountain of things to do, I figure that I ought to take at least some time on this “holiday” to do some point around. So I did, and here’s some of what I found:
- Mohawke’s Best of the Best Free and Open Source Software Collection. I’m particularly interested in the list for the Mac, but they have a lot of other stuff for other operating systems, of course.
- Some interesting info on Accessibility Workshops from cbd. This might come in handy for my “Writing for the World Wide Web” class.
- “Hackers Dissect Apple TV to Create the Cheapest Mac Ever.” This probably isn’t going to be the way we go to update our computer labs.
- Here’s an interesting portfolio (I’d probably give it an A).
- It sounds like Cheryl Ball had a great time speaking at Creighton, the gig I had last year. I concur with all her observations about the local beers and the groovy downtown area.
- Via John Walter’s blog, I found the initial issue of Digital Humanities Quarterly, and I can already see that I need to take a look at “Tenure, Promotion and Digital Publication” given that I am probably going to be revising my ironically disappeared essay, “Where Do I List This on My CV?”
Alright, this extended beyond Easter. Now it’s time to get back to work, and busy BUSY week of work it’s going to be.
"Technology Fear Factor in Education"
Pretty cool video, and I hadn’t heard of TeacherTube before this; great stuff for English 516 for sure.
Google Maps as a Writing Space
This is pretty cool:
Google Maps has rolled out a new feature where you can annotate and do all kinds of cool things with your own maps. Here’s one I made of EMU:
Mark Crane posted to techrhet about this and wrote “It is cool and fun, so that may prevent some instructors from
using it, but I thought I would mention it as a possible composing space.” Indeed; could be a fun writing project about where one is from though in a first year comp kinda class though, huh?
Something I'll do different with English 516 next year
I’m teaching the graduate course I teach all the time, Computers and Writing, Theory and Practice, online for the first time, and I think it’s turned out to be a great experience. (It’s been kind of an odd semester on the whole, because I’ve been way over-stretched by doing double-administrator-duty and because I’m not teaching any “face to face” classes this term, a teaching experience I have mixed feelings about, though they’re largely positive. But that’s a tangent and a slightly different story).
The class started a little slow, in part because some of the students were unfamiliar with the online format and the level of participation I was expecting, and in part because I wasn’t as prepared for teaching this class as I should have been. And I’ve been over-committed (see above). But once the ball got rolling, I think this class has been extremely exciting and vibrant, a lot more interactive and participatory than face-to-face versions from the past. I probably won’t do it online next year because the plan has been to alternate between face-to-face versions and online ones. But I’m looking forward to doing it online again.
There are a lot of things I’d do differently of course, and that for the time being brings me to what was to be the original point of this post:
Checking through my blog feed for the first time in a while this morning, I must say that I am constantly impressed by the stuff that is available from the site Open Culture. Podcast after podcast, info and examples of how we’re making the cross-over to video-based podcasts, about searches of wikipedia, a nice little podcasting primer, and podcasts (the old-fashioned kind and video ones) galore.
Just a really great distracting site, and one that I can see figuring into the next version of 516 for sure.
"Ditching" Microsoft Apps
Via cyberdash, I came across this article in InformationWeek online, “FAA May Ditch Microsoft’s Windows Vista And Office For Google And Linux Combo.” Here are the opening two paragraphs:
March is coming in like a lion for Microsoft’s public sector business. Days after InformationWeek reported that the Department of Transportation has placed a moratorium on upgrades to Windows Vista, Office 2007, and Internet Explorer 7, the top technology official at the Federal Aviation Administration revealed that he is considering a permanent ban on the Microsoft software in favor of a combination of Google’s new online business applications running on Linux-based hardware.
In an interview, FAA chief information officer David Bowen said he’s taking a close look at the Premier Edition of Google Apps as he mulls replacements for the agency’s Windows XP-based desktop computers and laptops. Bowen cited several reasons why he finds Google Apps attractive. “It’s a different sort of computing strategy,” he said. “It takes the desktop out of the way so you’re running a very thin client. From a security and management standpoint that would have some advantages.”
A bit of a poke into Google shows me that the same stuff is available to educational enterprises like this one for free, and the “premier” package is $50 a year.
I’m not familiar enough with these apps at this point to say if Google truly is ready to start charging $50 a year for what you get now, but I’ve been pretty pleased with gmail. I’ve started making the grand switch over, forwarding both of my personal and my school account to gmail, and the advantages of the interface outweigh the disadvantages so far.
The three things I like most about gmail at this point? First, the spam filter is dramatically more effective than what I had through my ISP, through EMU, and through Apple’s mail software. Second, the way that gmail sorts mail into “conversations” has turned out to be pretty handy. It’s taken some getting used to for me because you do have to dig into it a little bit to see what’s going on in a particular conversation, but the advantage is it keeps my inbox more compressed. And third, archiving everything with the ability to search through it easily means I don’t feel as compelled to sort every last email I get into a mailbox. I do label stuff that’s important still and I use that (basically) as a mailbox scheme, but just last night I found some message that I thought was long LONG gone just by sifting through a search. So that’s all been pretty cool.
So who knows? Maybe I’ll ditch MS Word next. I’ve already been playing around with iWork….
Of course, as far as Internet-based word processor or spreadsheet apps go, the disadvantage of having to be online to work with them are pretty obvious– perhaps not a big deal if you are working for the FAA and sitting at a desk all the time, but a bigger deal if you are a student or a teacher with a laptop who may or may not have decent wireless access at different points of the work day.
Flyin' low-tech at the CCCCs
Now that the EMU English Department conference is wrapped up, it’s on to my next task of this busy semester, getting my presentation ready for the CCCCs in New York in two weeks. My talk is called “Content Management Systems and Writing Program Administration: When Your Website is Not Something You Have, But Something You Are.” The bad news is that I’m presenting on Saturday morning; the good news is that I’m presenting at all because the only reason I’m on the program is because I asked if there was any way for the powers that be at the CCCCs to reconsider my proposal. They did and I’m on.
The other piece of bad news: I found out yesterday that the “technology” I will have access to at the conference will be limited to an overhead. If I want an LCD projector it’d come out of my own pocket, and if I wanted internet access (God forbid!), it cost me over $800. For just my session.
First off, I think one of the reasons that my tech access is so meager (and why I had a hard time getting on the program in the first place) is because I submitted this proposal not in the “Information Technology” cluster but in the “Theory” cluster. I did this because I see my presentation about ident(ities) more than about computer things, though, as the title perhaps suggests, I suppose it is about both. In any event, I guess folks in the “Theory” cluster don’t need any of that stinkin’ technology….
I briefly considered trying to borrow a projector from school to take with me, but I don’t think I want to be responsible for it (e.g., what if it breaks, what if it gets stolen, lugging the thing around, etc., etc.), and I’m not sure the powers that be at EMU would let me take it anyway. So while I’ve come to rely on somewhat elaborate PowerPoint (and now Keynote) presentations for conference talks like this, I guess I’ll have to figure out how to go back to “old school” with transparencies.
It’ll give me a chance to figure out how to print on the damn things again….
Excessive Computing
Well, I’ve gone and done it now: for the first time in around 10 years, my main home computer is now a desktop computer– specifically, a 20 inch iMac with a second 19 inch monitor. As Borat might say, very nice, very nice….
I decided to go with a desktop unit this time around for a couple of reasons. First, I’m doing a lot more stuff with audio and video (or really, “multimedia” since most of the movies I’ve played around with so far have actually been a bunch of still pictures), and that isn’t something that’s easy to do with a laptop. With this new computer, I got Final Cut Express, for example.
Second, just as a matter of work habits, I have found myself working at home a lot more in recent years. I used to do about 75% of my work in coffee shops; now I think it’s more like 25%. I can’t explain why exactly, but there you have it.
Third, I was in a kind of awkward in-between place in terms of computer upgrades. See, I had problems with my laptop fixed last spring, and while it is too slow, has too small of a hard drive, has a fussy touch pad, and has the letters rubbing off of the keys, it still works just fine. So, the way I figure it, I can actually use my laptop for what a laptop is for: as my auxiliary computer.
And fourth, I see myself moving more and more to computing strategies that will allow me to access my stuff from a variety of different computers. In other words, I don’t have to carry it all around with me on my laptop anymore. Web 2.0, I guess. For example, it seems inevitable to me that I will be switching soon to gmail for all of my official (and probably unofficial) email correspondence. As this list of the “Top 10 Gmail tips and hacks” and these instructions for “Turn(ing) Gmail Into Your Personal Nerve Center” suggest, there’s a lot of stuff beyond just email that this app can do.
I’m also playing around with an app/service called FolderShare, which allows me to access all the files on my home desktop computer via the web without a fixed IP number or any other fancy software stuff. It took me five minutes to install. I’m a little suspicious of it since I have no idea how this works and it is a Microsquish product, but it does work.
Anyway, enough blog posting. I need to go monkey around with this new toy….
An early report about "Internet"
A blast from the past– the late 1980s or so? I’m not sure. Two curious things about this piece include a reference to an early (well, in Internet terms) censorship case in Canada where some material on an ongoing trial that wasn’t supposed to be released to the public was on Internet, and, more noticeably, that there’s no article here– that is, it’s “Internet” and not “The Internet,” and certainly not “the internet.”
Book Support
This was posted on the WPA-L mailing list– pretty darn funny, if you ask me.