Category: Technology

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A few miscellaneous thoughts on iPad reading

I’ve come across a lot of articles about reading on the iPad lately, and thought I’d pass along some of them with some thoughts:

  • Jakob Nielsen doesn’t think the iPad is that cool in terms of usability. I dunno, seems a little like he’s a hater, though Nielsen does raise some interesting points about how the iPad exhibits the growing pains of moving from one kind of literacy technology to another.
  • How to self-publish a book for iPad. Really, how to self-publish a book for ePub format period.  This combined with this NYTimes editorial from Garrison Keillor, “The End of an Era in Publishing,” makes me think.  On the one hand, I don’t think that “self-publishing” is automatically going to spell the end of publishing business simply because there has always been self-publishers trying to get their work out there. Some were, for their time, pretty successful too– I believe Leaves of Grass was initially self-published.  On the other hand, this certainly changes the ease and scale of delivery possible with self-published electronic books.  Print something up on paper and your distribution point is pretty much limited to the street corner, maybe the trunk of your car; make an ePub book and the distribution point becomes international.
  • An interesting review of reading on the iPad, comparing iBooks, Kindle, and GoodReader. I personally think the differences between iBook and Kindle are pretty negligible, and really, Kindle has two possible advantages right now.  First, amazon.com/Kindle has A LOT more books available than Apple/iBooks.  Second, I can read Kindle books in multiple places.  So, for example, I have been reading (very slowly, in fits and starts) The Omnivore’s Dilemma on Kindle.  Sometimes, I read it on my iPad, but as often (maybe more often, since I do this at the gym while on the stationary bike) I read it on my iPhone.  What’s nice about Kindle is the book syncs up to my place.
  • I think a lot of the “love of the object” of the book is sort of misplaced, sort of like the sentiments in this NYTimes editorial, “Further Thoughts of a Novice E-Reader.” Verlyn Klinkenborg is mostly lamenting the loss of paper and look, probably smell and touch too.  Interestingly, it seems to me that a lot of what’s going on with the iPad is also a love (or hate) of the object.  I don’t think that the iPad or other tablets is going to completely eliminate the sort of fine books that Klinkenborg feels she (or he?  what is Verlyn?) might miss, but what might be a good thing is that these devices might save a lot of trees.  As the post “To Kindle or not to Kindle?” from “Limited Prerogatives” points out, a lot of those wonderfully smelling and feeling paper books end up wasting a lot of trees.  She quotes a NYTimes article about how the book and newspaper industries harvested something like 125 million trees, and something like about a third of books printed are returned to the publisher and/or “pulped.”
  • And while I don’t have any links to it, I’ve heard some interesting reactions to the Wired iPad App, which I (of course!) bought.  I don’t think it’s fair to complain about it because of all of the ads, because a) the print version of Wired is basically a Geek Glamour magazine, intensely heavy on ads that many of its readers actually want to read; b) a lot of the ads are pretty cool and interactive, and c) it’s how magazine publishers make money (dirty little secret).  I don’t think it’s fair to complain that it is just the print version on the iPad since I never had a print version of Wired that included video and audio.  And I also think it’s only a little fair to complain about how the Wired iPad app doesn’t allow for “cut and paste” copying or bookmarking, because while I would agree that these features would be nice, Wired is not exactly the kind of thing I read to “cut and paste” from.  Besides, they still have a web site.

    What I thought was more interesting with the new Wired App and all of these other things is how they are the latest in a long history of what happens when we make the transition from one literacy technology to another.  A number of people talk about this with the transition from early handwritten manuscripts into printed books:  at first, the printed books looked a lot like the handwritten ones, but then, after people figured out the capabilities of the technology, they looked different.  We still call web pages “pages” because they initially looked a lot like “words in a row” pages with some links, and once we figured out the technology, they ended up looking a lot different.

    But I’m not going to keep paying $5 a pop for it.  They either are going to have to set up some sort of subscription service (the print version delivered was about a third of the price on the newsstand), or they are going to have to drop the price for me to be a regular reader.

  • Finally, I downloaded and installed onto my iPad (as part of my iBooks library) Cory Doctorow’s new YA book For the Win. Despite his dislike of the iPad, I like Doctorow’s thinking and writing a lot, and I very much admire his practice of putting books up online for free.  But the iPad and similar devices raise an interesting question about the sustainability of this practice:  before the iPad, I might have been inclined to buy one of Doctorow’s paper books because as a matter of convenience and form, I would much rather read the paper book than the PDF (or whatever) on my computer screen.  As a result, Doctorow (and his publishers) would still sell a lot of books.  But if I’m inclined to read one of his books on an iPad or similar device anyway, why would I do anything but download the free version?  In other words, since the “free” version is no longer is a means of selling/promoting the “not free” version, how long will it be before Doctorow starts charging something to download the ePub from his site?
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C&W 2010 Part 1: Travels, Golf, Sessions, Conference

With the whole CCCOnline thing off my chest, I decided to divide this up into two parts because of my adventures with the iPad (as I mentioned before, I decided to take it instead of a laptop to the conference)– I’ll post about that one later.

Anyway, as usual, Computers and Writing was great, that one conference I go to every year where it really is “my people.”  There are a lot of conferences like C&W, actually– Rhetoric Society of America, the Council of Writing Program Administrators (and their conference is coming up in July), writing center folks, etc.  I like going to the CCCCs and participating in its “big tent,” but it’s a little more comfortable to be in the smaller tent (side show?) that is C&W.  Here’s how it went for me, more or less in this order:

Continue reading “C&W 2010 Part 1: Travels, Golf, Sessions, Conference”

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C&W2010 and the new CCCOnline (I always miss the “interesting” sessions)

Generally, I attend my department’s once a month or so faculty meetings, and generally speaking, they are kind of boring.  But when I miss a meeting, something inevitably contentious and/or otherwise interesting happens.  So it was at this year’s Computers and Writing Conference, or so it would appear.

Since I presented twice and back-to-back on Saturday afternoon (and I’ll have more about that and the rest of the C&W experience later), I decided to have a little “quiet time” before the “hog roast,” which was good but not really involving a “hog” on a spit as I was expecting. But I digress. Anyway, while I was hanging around my room and lazily looking through the twitter feed that was going on during the “featured deliverator” sessions, I noticed that things were heating up in the feed during Bump Halbritter’s “Exploring the Constellations of the New CCC Online.” Here are some of the tweets that peaked my interest (which I found via the “Twapper Keeper” for the conference):

@mday666 I’m excited, but wonder how it will be different from previous efforts at NCTE, and current journals like Kairos & C+C Online.

@rrodrigo @mday666 I’m thinking that’s one of the major ones, please prove me wrong!

@preterite disagree somewhat with Bump’s contention that CCCO 1.0 was just archiving: C. & D.’s indexing functions did much, much more.

@trauman @rrodrigo Not sure the comparison’s necessary. I’m just thinking context and a capacious history.

@mday666 @rrodrigo I’m not disagreeing; just want to see it to believe it. It would be great!

@kristinarola man, there’s a backstory here i do not know clearly…. watching 1/2 the people get it, and 1/2 the people not.

@selfe3 #cw2010 Bump’s Talk: ball, concerns about animosity between CCCC and C&W. How to bridge that? How to understand this will be sustainable.

@mday666 Cheryl asks how we can erase some of the issues we’ve had in the past, with mistrust between NCTE/CCCC and the C & W community.

@dcfitzg Some intense emotions swirling around ccc online intro and cfp

@thatcarlygirl @varhodes @kristinarola Not getting it either… But boy the mood sure shifted in here! Must hear backstory.

@warnick Maybe we can invite Dr. Phil to next year’s conference. He might be able to help us hug it out.

@preterite yet again, Derek asks the right question

@kristinarola this conversation would be way more interesting if i knew what was going on. veiled conversations by those in power. la lala. la.la.

@CNBlank As a newbie to the party, I’m not sure what to make of all of this. Civil but tense seems to be the mood.

If you’re not getting it from the Twitter feed, there was basically a very “frank” conversation about this new version of CCCOnline, especially given the ways in which this project has been less than successful in the past. As I understand it, my experience with the CCCs Online and being “disappeared” was invoked in the discussion,too. Go figure. In any event, for those who are curious and who are interested in at least a (small) part of the back story from my point of view:

Of course, there is a rich irony in the revised and re-published version of this article: it came about in part because version 1.0 of “Where Do I List This on My CV?” disappeared from College Composition and Communication Online, sometime in 2004 or 2005. This disappearance was something that I discovered (I believe as the result of an email inquiry from an interested reader); I was not informed about it by CCC or NCTE. The link for my article was http://www.ncte.org/ccc/www/2/54.1/krause.html. Essentially, one day the article was available at the site (and here, I’ve linked to the web archive version of the article), and then one day it was not.

I later learned that my article and presumably others that were published in this short-lived version of CCC Online fell through the cracks as the result of a change in editors and direction of the online version of CCC. I’m pleased to report that version 1.0 of the article is once again available via CCC Online at http://inventio.us/ccc/digital/krause/index.html. (actually, that link doesn’t work either)  Still, a Google search for the article is likely to turn up the old NCTE link or my own self-published version. This strikes me as problematic; after all, this was an article that was discussed online and has been cited in others’ scholarship. This was something I did indeed list on my CV; fortunately, I did not have to explain the absence of this article to my department’s tenure and promotion committee.

As I mentioned, I wasn’t at this CCConline session; that said, I think that there’s a lot of reasons why there was a “noticeable tension” in the room among folks who share my reservations about the ways that the NCTE and the CCCCs have mishandled this in the past.

But I want to be clear here:  I know this is not Bump’s fault, and we shouldn’t blame him. I know Bump is a good guy who will give this new version of the CCC Online his very best effort.  I talked with him quite a bit about this stuff Friday night, and I know that he is both personally and professionally invested in the success of this new venture.  I for one welcome as many different venues for publishing work viable to the computers and writing community as possible, and I think I’ve got a pretty good idea for a proposal to send to Bump yet this summer.

However, Bump has a tough job in front of him, both with “the community” and with NCTE.  I don’t envy his job, that is for sure.

Oh, and PS:  one of the things that came up via the Twitter feed was the “value” of a journal like Kairos in terms of tenure and promotion:  that is, is it “worth it” to publish in Kairos, or would it be more “worth it” to publish in something like an NCTE sanctioned CCCOnline?  I think all questions about tenure and promotion are local.  However, my experience with Kairos has been quite positive.  My most cited article was published in Kairos, “When Blogging Goes Bad.” It even ended up being included in T.R. Johnson’s anthology Teaching Composition:  Background Readings, which I think probably would count as “real scholarship” in just about any tenure and promotion case.

On the other hand, the one article I had published by the (arguably) more prestigious CCCOnline disappeared.

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The iPad as a writerly tool/space

Before I get too far along but also without going into a lot of detail, let me say a few things about my general “writerly” locale habits and how they’ve changed.  When I was in my PhD program, I worked with a tiny laptop (a PB 100!) at a very large desk set up in Annette’s and my “study” in the second bedroom of our small apartment. Then for years, my writing locale of choice were area coffee shops and my primary writing tool was my laptop.  Even at home, I had a small desk and a laptop.  Then both my interests in working with video and my work environment changed, so now I have quite a large desk area again, this one quite a bit nicer than that Bowling Green apartment. My primary writing station is an iMac souped up with extra RAM and such, and with a second monitor.  With this space, my writing habits have changed in that I now routinely have a dozen different windows open, two or three different applications going, etc., etc.  Plus I do about 80% of my work at this computer and this desk– teaching online, writing, commenting on student work, etc.

So, for the foreseeable future, my iPad is going to remain a sort of “second banana” as a writerly device, something to use when I’m writing and not here, which is to say not that often. Continue reading “The iPad as a writerly tool/space”

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Some miscellaneous iPad thoughts (including an answer to the “need” question)

Before I get to the writerly part of things, a couple of thoughts and iPad links:

  • Folks have said some very nice things about my iPad posts here and comments elsewhere, which suggests something about obtaining ethos that I hadn’t really thought of before:  if you don’t necessarily know what you are talking about, it is best to  a) be first and b) be willing to say what you think, wrong or right.
  • In my role as an iPad “expert,” I have been asked by people “why I need an iPad.”  This has happened surprisingly frequently.  Well, “need” is a concept that can be reduced to the very basic (e.g., water, food, shelter) or it can be rather frivolous (e.g., chocolate, scotch, snow globes), and everything in between.  I will say this though:  I am of the opinion that in modern American culture, almost everyone “needs” easy access to a computer, a television, and a radio (which is often replicated by the computer, of course).  I don’t know if everyone “needs” an iPhone, an iPod (which for me is my phone), a DVD player, a coffee maker, high speed internet access at home, or a car, but for me, all of these things are indeed “needs.”  Then there are things like washers and dryers, lawn mowers, and dishwashers:  these are kind of on the edge for me.  For example, when our dishwasher broke a few years ago, it took us almost a year to replace it.Anyway, for me, I think the iPad is somewhere between an iPhone and a dishwasher.  If something happened to my iPhone today, I would go out and buy another one, pretty much no matter what the cost.  If something happened to my iPad, well, I could probably go without for a while.
  • I continue to be amused and puzzled by iPad polarization, the “this is the end of civilization as we know it” versus the “this is the best thing ever.”  The latest thing in this category is this whole “the device just disappears” argument, as retold in this Wired Gadget Lab piece.  That strikes me as a little much.  (BTW, Wired has lots of good iPad articles collected here).
  • In more examples of how the iPad is actually useful for developing content:  check out this cool video of drawing on/with the iPad. The fingerless glove is a nice touch to prevent unintentional touching.
  • Obama apparently said something about not liking the iPad, though his comment (as discussed in this Salon.com piece) is more along the lines of “the kids today.”  Not that interesting.  More interesting to me is this comment that comes from Fox News Channel psychiatry correspondent Keith Ablow in response to this:  “The president is doubly correct. First of all, he is right (as I have written a number of times) that the Internet, Facebook and, yes, the new iPad and many other devices can interfere with people becoming wise and knowledgeable, rather than simply deluged with facts. They can also become estranged from real relationships and from themselves as they become obsessed with pretending to be stars on YouTube or worthy of “followers” on Twitter or popular with thousands of “friends” on Facebook.”  In other words, pretty much the same thing that Socrates said about writing in Phaedrus.
  • Here’s an interesting piece about reading on the iPad versus reading good-ol-fashioned books.  I don’t know if books are going to “disappear” or not, but this guy’s reaction here is different from mine.  I will admit that I don’t do a lot of reading on my iPad– I’m still mostly a paper kinda guy when it comes to magazines and books, for example– but I do find it very readable and light enough.  And I don’t constantly fear that I will be robbed if I take my iPad in public nor do I get a lot of inquiries about it from strangers.  Of course, I tend to take it out in public in “too cool for school” Ann Arbor.
  • “Two weeks of travel, Ten iPad lessons” by Michael Gartenberg over at slashgear is very good advice about using an iPad for travel instead of a laptop.  Every one of these lessons rings true to me, and I will find out a lot more about that and other iPad travel experiences very soon since I’m going to be going to the Computers and Writing Conference this weekend without a laptop and with my iPad. (See below).

Okay, with all that out of the way….

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Just a couple Facebook Privacy thoughts I’m willing to share…

I’ve come across a lot of stuff about Facebook Privacy lately– for example, there’s this piece from Read Write Web, “More Web Industry Leaders Quit Facebook, Call for Open Alternative,” which has a ton of links both in the article and in the comments on the “quitting Facebook” trend, and then there’s the often reposted “Top Ten Reasons You Should Quit Facebook.” In no particular order, I had a couple of thoughts:

  • There’s something interesting? odd? ironic? well, maybe just something– about how people seem to be rediscovering the privacy issues here a couple of years after the conventional wisdom for sites like Facebook and MySpace is that “kids” were being pretty stupid by putting up stuff that will come back to haunt them later. I realize that part of this new wave is a result of Facebook’s increasingly squishy privacy issues, but some of it also has to be because the fastest growing demographic on Facebook is “grown-ups” who supposedly know better.  And who don’t.
  • The concept/definition of “privacy” is not exactly stable, and this is by far from the first time that it’s been a contentious and potentially interesting issue. Remember Jennicam? Interestingly enough, the Wikipedia page I am linking to here says that Jennifer Ringley, who once pretty much broadcast “everything” out to the web, says she is now “enjoying her privacy.”  And maybe that’s part of what the deal is here too:  a lot of people kind of went a little over-board on the whole Facebook thing and now want to scale back a bit.
  • A lot of the complaints about Facebook seem to forget that it is not a “public space” or a completely free “community asset.”  Sure, they might be kind of asshole-ish as of late with various policies (not to mention just kind of tone-deaf to public critique), but they are a business that is trying to make money.  Part of the way they do that is by using your content; if you don’t like that, then don’t put up your content.
  • On the one hand, I don’t really care that much.  I mean, I’ve already got over 1600 pictures on Flickr all pretty much share-and-share-alike and there’s this and previous blogs; it’s not as if I’m leading that super-private of a life as it is.  And given that folks are okay with Amazon and Netflix making “choices” for you based on stuff you’ve browsed before, I don’t see exactly what is so wrong with Facebook targeting ads at you and treating your pages as if they are not completely private.  On the other hand, all of this dust-up is a reminder that Facebook is a public space, that those updates and pictures and stuff you post really can/will be seen by lots of people.
  • 16 or 15 years ago, I remember going to a talk at BGSU where someone was talking about this newfangled “email” system that was going on campus, and the presenter warned people then of their privacy:  don’t email anything you wouldn’t want to see showing up on a billboard or in the New York Times. That’s probably a little extreme for email nowadays, but words to live by on the book o’ face.
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iPad “killer apps” for Academics (maybe)

Okay, one more iPad post, and then on with my regular (not necessarily relevant) postings.

Being an iPad expert (as I have owned one for an entire week now), I’m still pretty darn happy and impressed with it. So far, it’s mostly for me what it has been billed as:  a great “experience” for reading/consuming text, audio, and video.  It is not (for the zillionth time) a computer, though for me, it is something like a netbook.  I realize that this wouldn’t be true for everyone, especially non-Apple computer people, but since the rest of my computers are Apples, the iPad syncs and “just works,” which wouldn’t be the case if I was working with some kind of Windoze netbook.

Typing is an issue, but that’s the case with netbooks too, right?  For me, I can touch-type well enough on the iPad when it’s landscape mode, but if I’m going to type anything longer than a couple paragraphs or an email response (or this blog post), then I’m going to use a real computer.  I might break down and eventually buy a keyboard for the iPad, but that would kind of defeat the purpose of the lean simplicity of the iPad.

And it doesn’t strike me as particularly “magical” either, though given the fondness for fantasy and science fiction in my household, perhaps my standards and definitions of “magical” are different than Steve Jobs.  All the things the iPad does best– stuff like IMDB, Yahoo Entertainment, Netflix, various weather and newspaper apps, photos, music, videos, etc.– are all great, but not really beneficial for my job as a writing professor.  Safari is okay (very quick, but, as the entire world knows, no Flash) and email is great, but neither are reasons to get an iPad.

I have played around with Keynote and Pages a bit, and while there’s some potential, I have to say I’ve been a little disappointed.  On the plus-side (as I wrote about with this post earlier), both Keynote and Pages demonstrate that the iPad is indeed a device with which a user can make content.  But the problem with both apps is that they don’t quite synch with my desktop versions of the software– different fonts, not all the effects and builds work, etc. Plus there are the previously mentioned keyboarding issues. It’s not a deal-breaker by any means, but it does mean that if I take only my iPad to a conference or something instead of a laptop, I’ll have to make some adjustments.  Again, not a reason to get an iPad, at least not yet.

All that said, I do think there are so far two (or three, depending on how you look at it) potential “killer apps” for the iPad:  PDF annotation and books, both iBooks/Kindles, and “books” that are really applications on their own.  Too long of a ramble/review after the jump.

Continue reading “iPad “killer apps” for Academics (maybe)”

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Anybody who says that the iPad is the end of user-generated content or the internet does not know what they are talking about

Emily posted a link to an NPR story from yesterday I missed, “Apple’s iPad: The End of the Internet as We Know It?” Here’s a tease quote:

On its Web site, Apple boasts that the iPad makes you “feel like you are actually holding the Web right in the palm of your hand.”

Paul Sweeting, an analyst with GigaOM, sees it differently. “With the iPad,” he says, “you have the anti-Internet in your hands.”

Please.  Buy a clue.

Oddly, the review on GigaOM’s web site of the iPad seems pretty positive to me, so I’m not sure where this Sweeting guy is coming from, other than he gives good sound-bite and NPR took the bait.  In any event, as an iPad expert (for I have had one now for going on four days), let me point out some obvious things:

  • The iPad is not a computer. It is not a substitute for a desktop or laptop computer anymore than an iPhone or an iTouch are substitutes.  It might be a substitute for a netbook for some users, but that’s a debatable point.  This is not to say that you can’t do a bunch of computer things on an iPhone or iTouch (email, listen to music, surf the web to an extent, play with/use apps, etc.), and it is also true that I think that the iPad generally handles these tasks better than its smaller ancestors.  But no one should think that they can get an iPad instead of a computer.  That’s just dumb.
  • No one is stopping you from uploading your own music and videos to the iPad. Again, just as is the case with the iPhone and iTouch, you can put whatever music, podcasts, or movies that iTunes can handle on the thing, and that includes stuff ripped from other sources.  Like everyone else in America, I have music on my computer that I did not pay for (most of it is stuff I checked out from the library) and I have a few videos that I ripped with the help of Handbrake.  I transferred them to the iPad, played them, and the Apple police have yet to knock on my door.  And of course, if you create the music or video content yourself, you can play that on the iPad too.
  • No one is stopping you from making and distributing your own ePubs that are then readable on the iPad. And while I haven’t done this yet, there are a number of pretty easy to use conversion tools out there that will take that novel that has been rejected by every publisher out there and turn it from a .doc file into a .epb file.  From there, you can just slap it up on the web at your own site or use one of the various distribution networks for such things and completely bypass the Apple store.  Users can download your ePub, import it into iTunes, upload it to their iPad.  Done.
  • The iPad has some pretty cool apps for actually making content as it is. Pages and Keynote are both pretty slick, and when it comes to layout, the touchpad might make it easier for novice artists like me to move around images and stuff by just touching them instead of dragging them with a mouse.  Plus I’ve got Brushes (a paint program that I wish I was more talented to use better), Draw (simple drawing program), iAnnotate PDF, Dragon Dictation (though I don’t know how well that one works yet), and Whiteboard.

Honestly, I do not get what the haters are getting at.  It ain’t the end of anything; at best, the iPad is the beginning of something else.

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The iPad, the first 30 or so hours

So, I went ahead and did it: I got an iPad. Here’s the scoop so far:

I’ve been interested in some kind of tablet/electronic textbook sort of tool for a long time, so when the long-rumored and poorly named Apple iPad finally appeared, warts and all, I was intrigued, but I wasn’t that crazy about ordering one before I actual saw one/touched one. Then I started seeing more and more hype, more and more cool apps. I think the one that really changed my mind was Netflix– I don’t know, but that just seemed like something I had to have, and I regretted not pre-ordering.

We were planning on having Bill and Leslie HD down for dinner iPad talk Saturday (Leslie wanted one big-time too), and I figured I would take my chances at the Apple store. I wasn’t willing to wait in line, so the plan was to go by about 10 am and see what I could do. I figured I would at least be able to order one. Well, Leslie called before that, said she was at a Best Buy and she could buy one for me if I wanted it. Oh yes, I wanted, I wanted.

I went to the Apple store anyway, and truth be told, I think I could have gotten one. They had quite an orderly set-up: people who were going to buy got in line in a designated area, and everyone else was free to browse/monkey with the demo models. I would be surprised if getting them on Monday or Tuesday of this week at the store will be a problem.

I’m not going to bother to rehash all the various reviews, praises, and condemnations that have come out over the iPad, but I will offer a few scattered impressions after having one for just over a day now:

  • It is super-duper zippy with everything, browsing, email, the apps, etc. Surprisingly fast.
  • The lack of flash thing isn’t that big of a deal to me, though I don’t regularly use a lot of super-intense flash kinds of sites, either. And I don’t care that much about not being able to run multiple apps at the same time. And I don’t care that it doesn’t have a camera or a phone because I have an iPhone already. Which leads me to the next point:
  • It is definitely not a substitute for a laptop and it isn’t quite a netbook either. It really is like a giant iTouch, and I mean that as a good thing. The capabilities it has over an iTouch are nice, and the size of the display makes a huge (no pun intended) difference.
  • The apps that are not iPad ready are fine to me, and for some of them, the bigger buttons is kind of a plus, like those over-sized remote controls they sell for old people. Kinda nice. Of the iPad native apps I’ve played with so far, I really like IMDB, the NPR app, the weather bug app, and the USA Today app (and I don’t usually read that paper).
  • As for the well-publicized iBook reader: I think it’s totally sweet, especially when I combine it with the iPad version of Kindle. But what I really REALLY like is that there is already the app I was really wanting, something that would allow me to take notes on PDFs. It’s called iAnnotatePDFs, and it’s a perfect example of how the size of the screen matters because this would be completely unworkable on the iPhone. It’s far from a perfect app, but it I’ll do what I need it to do, and considering the fact that the iPad has only been on the market for a day, it’s a pretty good start.
  • Last but not least: the long life of the battery is no joke, and the keyboard issue is not that big of a deal to me. I wrote this on the virtual keyboard in landscape mode, and for me, I can basically touch-type on it. I might get a separate keyboard eventually, but I’m in hurry.

Now, if you will excuse me, I need to go back and play around with this thing….

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A little pre-writing on a C&W presentation on mentorship

I’m going to do two presentations at the Computers and Writing conference at Purdue and one of them is called “Virtual Mentorship.” It was a panel cooked up by Derek for a variety of reasons, and I suppose one of the reasons why I’m involved is because I am his officially designated mentor.  And it occurs to me that I ought to start thinking about this….

A few pre-writing thoughts this morning:

  • I have to somehow work into this the “mentor” I had at Southern Oregon University when I started my first job way back when.  I can’t remember this guy’s name (and I should say I don’t exactly blame him for his approach to “mentoring”), but the main thing he wanted to talk about was his retirement plan, not exactly the kind of thing that was on my mind as a starting professor.
  • In my estimation and research about blogging, I think that the best metaphor for community is “parallel play,” which is a common and easily observed practice among toddlers where they don’t so much play together as they play next to each other.  Most bloggers, it seems to me, are interacting next to each other rather than directly with each other, meaning that what counts as “community” is a little more loosely formed.
  • Unlike my institutionally assigned relationship at SOU, mentorship in/through blogs comes indirectly and often anonymously.  I think that the late John Lovas was very much a blogging mentor to me and many others in my cohort of bloggers, though I only met him once and I don’t know to what extent he was aware of his mentoring role.
  • Along these lines: it seems to me that a lot of academic types who I used to follow as bloggers have either stopped entirely and often publicly, or have slowed down so much that they might as well have stopped.  Maybe it’s because they have matured out of toddler-hood and no longer are interested in the side-by-side play that is the blogosphere; maybe, as is usually the case with rhetorical situations, the situation itself has “degraded” and/or reached a point of closure.  Maybe they just got bored.  At first, my reaction to this was “oh, people just don’t blog anymore.”  But really, I think what is happening is that a new generation/cohort of academic and/or comp/rhet bloggers is emerging for me, including Ryan Truman and Brian McNely, not to mention a ton of people I came across/learned about through the Twitter feed for the CCCCs.
  • So really, even though I am a “designated mentor” for Derek and I have served in that function by showing him some of the ropes at the institution and with the main undergraduate class we both teach, it seems to mentorship is a two-way street.  I’m getting as much from him and these other “younger guys” than I’m giving, probably more.