In an analysis of professional burnout among professors, a Texas Woman’s University Ph.D. candidate found tenure track professors had more significant symptoms of workplace frustration than their tenured and non-tenure track faculty counterparts.

Janie Crosmer, who conducted the survey of more than 400 full-time faculty across the U.S. in December 2008, said she was unsurprised that the high stresses of pursuing academe’s most coveted status led to burnout. As she discussed those stresses during a presentation Wednesday, audience members nodded in agreement, and one faculty member among them described the pursuit of tenure as “a living hell.”

The comments on the piece suggest that for at least some, that burn-out/living hell thing continues into tenure, promotion, emeritus status, and beyond.

On the same day, Dean Dad (aka Confessions of a Community College Dean) had a post titled “Lions in Winter,” in which he takes up this post by Tenured Radical, in which TR contemplates Helen Thomas rather sudden  retirement and how her situation and obvious deterioration (I believe Thomas is about to turn 90) is similar to that of some “Venerable professor famous for irascible personality and eclectic remarks goes right over the edge one day and has to be forcibly retired, when in fact the signs of ineffectiveness and mental decline have been clear to close colleagues for several years: inappropriate remarks, fits of rage and/or confusion, memory lapses of gargantuan proportions.”

Dean Dad goes on to lament this situation:

Since the Supreme Court decided — absurdly, in my view — that tenure is fine but mandatory retirement isn’t, there’s literally no way to push the declining self-caricature out the door short of a documented public meltdown. Of course, by the time that happens, there has typically been a long train of abuses that either weren’t public or weren’t quite enough in themselves, as documented, to stand up in court. (Part of that usually has to do with the power that senior faculty have, and the fear that others have of that power. Fear of retaliation for coming forward is powerful, and it prevents the effective documentation of some very real behaviors.) And the combination of age discrimination laws, tenure, unions, the ADA, and public sympathy can make it effectively impossible for even a conscientious administrator to solve the problem.

So, on the one hand, faculty are burnt-out, bitter, stressed, emotionally exhausted; on the other hand, they hang on to their tenured positions far too long, sometimes to the point of being far beyond their prime.

Now, I can think of colleagues who fit both of these caricatures.  Because the tenure and promotion requirements in my department are both modest and humane, I think my colleagues here who see that process as a “living hell” are more or less creating that for themselves.  The self-inflicted notion of all this is something I’ll return to in a second.  The very senior colleagues who appear to be “losing it” is arguably more common at EMU, perhaps because the place is less of a “living hell” than the kinds of places where faculty burn-out long before they reach senility.

And I can also think of faculty who are both burnt-out and bitter, and appear to be “losing it” and behaving more and more irrationally.  Actually, this is not an uncommon combination in the aged, right?

Still, there’s something of a contradiction to me here.  How is it that faculty can be both burnt-out and holding on to their jobs far too long?  Is the suggestion that there are basically two different kinds of faculty, those who are burnt-out and bitter and thus retire/exit academia as soon as they are able, and those who aren’t burnt-out and outstay their welcome?  I’m not sure.

I’m at an age where I can see retirement conceptually, kind of like the way I could see what it might be like to have a “real job” when I was twelve, but I have a hard time right now imaging retiring. As I said to a colleague the other day, what would be the point?  What else would I be doing?  I pretty much get to do what I want to do now as it is.  A lot can and will change in the next twenty or thirty years of course– assuming I make it for that long and (hopefully) longer– but right now, I suspect I am more likely to leave academia as that “crazy old guy” as opposed to the more bitter/burnt-out one.

But it also seems to me that those who are being identified in Crosmer’s study as being burnt-out are perhaps in that state of affairs more because of who they are rather than their chosen profession.  There is a link between the two, but I’m questioning the causality; in other words, I would suggest that it isn’t the work of academia that inherently burns people out, but rather, that the people who go into academia tend to be of the type who are going to burn themselves out and describe any number of work/life environments a “living hell.”  I’ve worked any number of low-stress (and generally low-paying) jobs over the years, and from what I can recall, there are lots of people who are able to turn almost anything into a “living hell” with their bad ‘tude.  What I think is probably the case is academia attracts more of these kinds of folks than some other fields.

In my own experience, I experienced “workplace frustration” most acutely as a PhD student, especially when I was trying to finish that diss.  “Living hell” is a bit strong, but the situation for me at my first job at Southern Oregon was “challenging.”  But once I got here, and especially once I got tenured and promoted, the workplace frustrations– while still clearly present– became more manageable.  But as I’ve said before and I’ll say again, I think that most academics who feel burnt-out and miserable about what they are doing ought to spend some time doing something like shoveling coal or cleaning toilets.  Suddenly that stack of essays and administrative busy-work doesn’t seems so bad.

Before I left for Purdue, I printed out my two talks– good ol’-fashioned paper, which I probably would have been using with or without a laptop, though I thought about going for the truly unnecessarily repetitive and redundant by bringing my laptop to project my presentations and my iPad to read from my script/notes. As I mentioned before, I prepared my Keynote presentations on my iPad itself to avoid the “translation” problems of converting a desktop presentation– basically, the desktop version of Keynote is just different enough from the iPad version to screw up fonts, some graphics, builds, etc.  Better to skip that hassle and just start with the iPad in the first place.

Both of the Keynote shows I put together were fairly simple, but not uncomfortably so– in other words, I ultimately didn’t feel like I was “lacking in power” by just using the iPad version of Keynote.  My shows had “builds” and graphics and the like, and the presentation I did about YouTube included about 8 minutes worth of video.  The “trick” to including the photos and the video I discovered through a little trial and error was to put together an album of photos and video I wanted to use for my presentations together on my desktop first and then uploaded it to the iPad, making note to check the box for including both photos and videos onto my album.  From there, building the presentation with videos and photos was easy.

I had heard the day before my presentation that some people were having “issues” with connecting their iPads to the projectors at the conference, but I did not find that to be the case at all.  Basically, I just plugged in my iPad Dock Connector to VGA Adapter and I was good to go– well, good to go for my Keynote presentations and a few other functions.  The reviews of this product on the Apple web site are accurate in that this adapter allows you to project Keynote presentations (and it’s not quite as nice as the dual monitor mode you get with a laptop), it’ll project photos/slide shows, and I think it’ll project movies (I haven’t tried it on anything long that I’ve ripped yet), and that’s it.  It is not a “mirror mode” device that projects whatever it is you see on the iPad onto a projector.  This lack of capability disappointed me after I bought it, but for my purposes generally and at this conference, it was not a big deal.

For all of my other basic “computing needs” while at the conference, the iPad worked fine.  I never had any wifi problems (though I heard that some folks with iPad did have problems connecting to the Purdue network), email and basic web surfing were fine, etc., etc.  There was only one time where the lack of Flash was a problem, and that was looking at some videos that Alexis Hart’s sixth grade niece had done– not exactly mission critical stuff.  And I was even able to open that with CloudBrowse, though it is slow and probably not worth it for most Flash applications.

And of course, the iPad was a pretty good conversation piece– not as much with people curious about what it’s “like” but more with people who have one and who want to know what I was doing with mine (and vice-versa).  There were quite a few people sporting iPads at this conference, too.  I ran into Kathy Yancey and we talked for a good 45 minutes, her mostly asking me questions about this or that piece of software.  It was interesting to me because we were coming at the device quite differently.  She admitted to coming at all this from a Windoze sort of background, and she wanted to know where the manual was; me, I always just “play” with stuff, and while the iPad is different, it is close enough to the Apple nomenclature to be pretty easy for me to pick up on quickly.  I think the iPad is one of those things that doesn’t really need any explanation; Kathy thought it would be good if I did a workshop on what worked well.  I’m not sure who is right, but if someone wants to bring me in as they iPad expert….

Anyway, on the whole, the iPad lived up to its “netbook-like” potential for travel for me.  It’s lighter and smaller, and with a kick-ass battery life. It’s not great for updating my WordPress blog or for doing anything too complicated, but for everything else, a thumbs up.

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:

Steve B. and I began the “experience” as Bill HD’s “SAG” wagon as part of the Ride2CW fund-raiser/biking campaign.  Frankly, our job was easy compared to our west to east SAG counterpart, Joyce, because all we had to do was navigate along Bill’s route through Indiana Amish country and catch up with him, which we did, more or less in the middle of nowhere near Bourbon, IN.  It was pretty, but it made for a long LONG day.  Oh, and Bill rode his bike a lot too.

For a variety of reasons (though mostly money, to be honest), Steve B. and I decided to do the weekend only registration for the conference and play golf on Friday.  This was perhaps a mistake in at least two different ways.  First, I kind of felt a little “out of it” conference-wise, and, as I’ll get to in a moment, I didn’t have as much of a chance to see panels.  Second, the weather was, um, “problematic.”

Here’s a video of me hitting out of water in the middle of the fairway.  This was the last hole we played before the sogginess got to be too much and the siren blew, meaning lightening was sighted:

I want to point out that that is Benninghoff going “Oh, YEAH!” like the Kool-Aid Pitcher.  This will soon be my Steve B. designated ring-tone.

Friday evening included dinner with Gian Pagnucci (who also golfed with me and Steve B. and also presented with us on Saturday) and my EMU colleague Nancy Allen at Kokoro, “Home of Crazy Tony.” “Crazy Tony” is the drunk crazy proprietor who likes to refer to himself as the sushi nazi and/or a crazy motherfucker.  Both, really, and he likes to do this quite loudly from behind the bar.  I thought it was “pretty good,” though when I gave this review to Steve B. and Bill HD (who spent a fair amount of this trip going down the memory lane of their past experiences here when they were going to Purdue for their PhDs), they thought I was crazy, that it’s the best evar, etc.  Anyway, “pretty” good food and good company for sure.

Then Saturday was the conference proper.  Like I said, I decided to go the “weekend only” route because the registration was  half-price.  It was a good cost saving measure obviously, but it was also (I guess as obviously) a lot less conference.  The 8:30 concurrent session was a little early for me, so I intended to go session F.  But then I ran into Kathy Yancey who had an iPad question which lead to a pleasant and interesting conversation on iPad-ness (more on that in part 2, when I get to it). It was a good thing, one of those hard to quantify “networking” opportunities that make things like conferences so useful, but it meant that I missed the session.

The lunch/featured speaker was Eric Faden, who, among many other things, made the popular “A Fair(y) Use Tale” video. I thought his talks was pretty good– not great, but not bad, like Barbara Ganley last year.  I think it’s kind of a tough gig to do a keynote at C&W.  The conference tends to bring in “outsiders” to broaden our perspectives and also because whenever an “insider” speaks in this role they inevitably are met with a “we already know that” sort of response.  The problem with the outsider is sometimes the reaction is sort of “we wouldn’t do that” and/or “what the heck are you talking about?”  So, for example, while a lot of what Faden said and showed was very interesting and useful, I think there was a sense of him setting up a bit of a false dichotomy (words/text versus images/video), and some of the videos he showed were of a sort that probably would not work in most of the audience members’ teaching (e.g., “writing” classes versus “film” classes).  But overall, I thought he walked that line pretty well.  Oh, and even though there was a sort of a “oh no he didn’t!” response when he invoked Ong, I thought it was a reasonable summary under the circumstances.

Then it was time for me and my colleagues to talk.  First there was Steve B., Gian, and me talking about using Jing, podcasts, and YouTube.  Here’s a link to my talk, more or less. I wish Steve B. would have showed more examples, but I guess it’ll be easy to ask him for those; and Gian did a good job showing and telling about some interesting videos and podcasts going on at IUP.  And to be honest, I was kind of surprised that we had as big of a crowd as we did for this session, I guess proving that this stuff isn’t “old news” yet.

Second, there was me, Ryan Trauman, Brian McNely, and Derek Mueller talking about “virtual mentorship.”  My talk for that is here.  Overall, pretty good.  I’d like to hear more about Ryan’s pottery apprenticeship and how that maps with “mentorship” (he ran out of time, more or less), I’m glad that Brian posted his piece online because he had a lot of heavy (I mean that in a good, groovy way) theory in there, and Derek and I had more or less talked about his talk before, so I knew what was coming and I thought it made good sense to me.  Though I don’t know what happened to the picture that Indian restaurant waiter took.

After that, it was the previously mentioned missed session, the “hog roast” that was good but not really a hog roast, and evening activities, which included going with some colleagues to a VERY undergraduate bar of the sort I have not been in for years and years.

Sunday, I went to a presentation by some of the folks at MSU’s WIDE Center about a system that they are developing as part of a larger project at MSU on peer review.  Basically (and I do mean “basically” since I don’t have notes here and a lot of the details are actually part of a non-disclosure agreement), these folks are working with software that helps reviewers’ reviews be rated for “helpfulness.”

Like I said, I don’t quite understand all the computer stuff associated with this, but this is another example of how a lot of what I get out of the a conference like Computers and Writing is not really about “computers” per se.  From my point of view, there were a couple of things that these folks were doing to help figure out their “helpfulness” rating.  First, reviewers scored each of the writers’ drafts based on a simple star system.  Second, the writers more or less reviewed the reviewers in terms of how many of their suggestions they incorporated, etc.  Now, it seems to me that this is the sort of thing that could be done in a much less sophisticated/technological fashion to help facilitate peer review.  I haven’t thought through all of that last sentence yet, but I am hoping to experiment with something like that this summer term.

Anyway, a good conference for me overall.  I never know what “themes” emerge from these things since I can only go and see a tiny fraction of what’s available, and this time around, because of the two day thing, I saw even less.  But if I had to pick one– maybe two– I’d say “video” and (closely related, I guess) changing/expanding the definition of what “fits” in the conference.  It isn’t all just about “writing,” for example.  Or, depending on how you define it, it’s all about writing…..

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.

Here’s how the article opens:

Faculty members and administrators in Texas are speaking out about a recent state law that requires them to post specific, detailed information about their classroom assignments, curricula vitae, department budgets, and the results of student evaluations.

A conservative group whose administrators have close ties to Gov. Rick Perry lobbied for the law, saying it offers important “consumer protection.” Opponents counter that it has created an expensive and time-consuming burden and offers little benefit to the public.

Beginning this fall, universities will have to post online a syllabus for every undergraduate course, including major assignments and examinations, reading lists, and course descriptions.

Curricula vitae must include a faculty member’s teaching experience and contributions to professional publications. All of the information must be no more than three clicks away from the college’s home page.

Colleges are required to assign compliance duties to a campus administrator and, every other year, send a written report to the governor and legislative leaders.

Okay, I have some questions/concerns– what exactly does the law mean by “specific, detailed information,” for example?  And what’s the nature of this report to be submitted to the governor and legislative leaders?

Still… what’s the big deal here?  I mean, I have posted pretty specific classroom assignments, readings lists, course descriptions, and the like on the web for years and years.  Lots of people I know have some version of the CV up online, including me (though mine is not at all complete and it is a little out of date).  Basic results of student evaluations have been available to students at EMU for years, and there is a little site called ratemyprofessor.com that has been doing a problematic version of public student evaluations for years.  I think it would awesome if the administration would be a little more forthcoming about institutional budgets. And quite frankly, given all the horseshit reports that administrators make faculty write in the name of program review, accountability, and “strategery,” I think it is more than fair to make the administrators write a few horseshit reports themselves.

Here’s how the article ends:

Theresa J.C. Norman, an instructor of philosophy at South Texas College, calls the reporting requirements “a waste of time.”

Ms. Norman, who is also president of the South Texas Faculty Association, also resents what she sees as the law’s underlying assumptions. “You get the feeling that the government sees us as slackers,” she says. By requiring professors to list every assignment, she says the law interferes with her ability to respond to students’ interests and current events and shift to different topics during the semester.

Texas Tech University has spent $85,000 upgrading its server and hiring an administrator to train faculty members how to create digitally-searchable CV’s and syllabi that will meet the law’s requirements, according to Valerie O. Paton, vice president for planning and assessment.

The bill’s sponsor, Rep. Lois W. Kolkhorst, wanted to protect students and tuition-paying parents at a time of rising college costs, according to her chief of staff, Chris Steinbach. “Enrolling in a course and finding that it’s not what you needed can be an expensive mistake,” he says.

If this law means that faculty have to give REALLY specific details about assignments to the point where it is not possible for changes/modifications to the course, then I would agree.  But is that what this law is saying?  Really?

And an $85,000 server upgrade and training for faculty?!? Really.  Really? How hard is it to slap a PDF up on the web nowadays?

Now, I will admit that I teach in a state and at a university that is considerably more left-leaning than Texas, and I also don’t teach in an area that is particularly controversial.  I mean, the public at large gets a lot more “excited” about the politics of teaching evolution in biology or “dirty books” in literature than they do about teaching the controversies about writing and technology.  I don’t think I have to worry too much about Teabaggers coming after me for English 328.

Still, what’s the big deal here?  What am I missing?

Anyway, today in Inside Higher Ed, I read “No Grading, More Learning,” which is about a “non-grading” scheme Duke University professor Cathy Davidson had as she returned to the classroom after being out of it for a number of years in administration.  To quote from the article:

Her plan? Turn over grading to the students in the course, and get out of the grading business herself.

Yeah, I don’t really understand what that means either….

Just to be clear:  I’m not saying that Davidson was doing anything bad.  I’ve done all kinds of different things to experiment with grading in my classes.  For example, I have students at all levels do a self-assessment for their participation grade, mainly because I want students to be “self-aware” that what they do (or don’t do) and how that leads to a particular grade.  People have done various kinds of contract grading in writing classes for years, and I think Peter Elbow and one of his colleagues had an article in College Composition and Communication a while ago about the “B” contract grade, something that I’m toying with laying out to students the next time I teach 328 in the summer term.

That said, this article and some of the responses to it does raise a few issues for me.

• Whenever I hear a teacher/professor say something like “students just did ‘x’ all on their own, just because they could, I had nothing to do with it,” my bullshit detector goes off.  I was at an academic conference recently where a presenter spoke about how his/her students “just did stuff” magically spontaneously in the course this person was teaching. I almost said “yeah, right…” out loud. Like I said, I don’t quite think this is what Davidson is saying here, but when she does make the claim that she didn’t grade at all, that it was all based on “crowdsourcing,” that the students had control, etc., etc, when she says stuff like that, well, the bullshit detector doesn’t go off, but it does rattle quite a bit.
• Note that she is teaching at Duke University, which is the kind of place where, if nothing else, students have an acute understanding of what it takes to get certain kinds of grades and to succeed academically. And this is not a class of first year students either, meaning that they were probably already far enough along to understand the “game” method that Davidson was “playing” employing. And note also that this was a class of less than 20 students, a size that makes this sort of alternative “non” grading a manageable task.  Try this in a lecture hall of 250 first year students at a place like EMU and see how it turns out.
• I think it’s interesting that this approach to grading turned out “perfect.” Davidson even gave herself an “A+.” I suppose I have already covered reasons why it might have turned out as great as it did– fantastic students at a fantastic institution in a small class, and perhaps they were prodded along a little more than Davidson suggests to make the “magic” happen.  And let’s give Davidson credit– I’m sure she’s a good teacher. Still, there weren’t any students who weren’t a little freaked out or bothered by the whole thing? I don’t know….

  Whenever I ask students to self-assess themselves for participation, I always get at least one or two who avoid the process, usually because they say they “don’t feel comfortable” giving themselves grades.  Then there are students who, as part of the self-assessment process, ask how many “points” some sort of activity is worth; when I tell them I don’t keep points like that, they look at me sort of confused, as if I had said “I don’t believe in gravity.”

  And then there are of course the grade-grubbers (“I have to get the highest grade you have ever awarded to anyone or I simply will not be able to live with myself and you will have my death on your mind forever and ever”), the slackers (“Dude, can I still pass this class if I don’t turn in the last three assignments?  No?  How about if I handed in one of them?”), etc., etc., etc.  We’ve all been there.

  Davidson tries this once and it works out perfect?  Really.  Really?

• Finally, it is at times like these, times when I really don’t need to be thinking about grades at all, where I contemplate once again designing the course so that it is worth 1,000,000 points.  Basically, this just adds some zeros to the percentages (I suppose I could make the whole course worth just one point, too), but when I did this years and years ago, it did spark some interesting conversations with my students, conversations like “I think you’re going to need to pick up 50,000 points on these last two assignments to get a B-.”

Anyway, some thoughts on the term that was, the coming spring, and other things, in no particular order:

• I’ve done more rethinking about 328 in the last two years than I think I did in the first ten years of teaching the class, experimenting with new assignments, changing orders of things, changing from the emuonline CMS to a WordPress-empowered web site– engl328.stevendkrause.com — and I already know about some other changes I will make in the summer term too.  I think that’s been one of the anticipated benefits of bringing in a new guy with new ideas about the course.
• Oh, and I will not be returning to emuonline for a CMS anytime soon.  I might put up some protections on the wordpress installs for 516 and 328 though, particularly 328.  In 516 (that is, “Computers and Writing, Theory and Practice”), the openness of the class site worked great because we had about a half-dozen of the authors of articles we were reading stop by and participate in the discussions.  But in 328, I think the publicness of it all kind of scared a few students off.
• The next time I teach 328 (in the summer), I think I am going to have a peer review experience that requires students to get feedback from a reader from outside the class and report back on that experience.  I keep trying to impress upon students the idea that they need to keep that magical audience of a “reader beyond the class” in mind, but it seems like this is very difficult for most of my students to imagine in the abstract.
• It is really interesting to me how radically the “same class” (more or less) can be with different students.  My section of English 328 in the fall term was, to put it charitably, “problematic;” this term, it was great.  As I wrote about here last year, my graduate class last year was not the best, in part because of a rather troublesome exchange I discussed about a year ago here. I mean, I have always known that no two classes are ever the same because of the differences in readings, discussions, assignments, and students.  I guess I’m just struck now how a few really “bad apples” (which I did not have this term) really can make a huge difference for the worse.

Anyway, farewell winter term….

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.

First, about PDF annotation: it’s all fine and good that the Kindle (and other readers I’ve seen) can deliver trade books and best sellers, but what I need is something that can read all the PDFs I get from academic journals.  This makes up the bulk of my reading for teaching– especially graduate courses– and scholarship, and it seems like more and more academic presses are making entire books available as PDFs.

So, what I’ve wanted for a very long time in a tablet reader device (and what I was hoping for with the iPad even when it was first announced) where I can read, search, annotate, and share all those PDFs I now have to print out and annotate on paper, printouts I inevitably lose, misfile, can’t search electronically, etc. This is probably not the kind of thing your “average user” is that interested in, but it is something that just about every academic-type I know says they want too.

Well, as the saying goes, there’s an app for that.  A couple apps, actually.

iAnnotate from Aji allows you to mark-up a PDF on the iPad pretty much the way you would with a highlighter and/or pen on a paper version of the text.  Here’s a video from them demonstrating how it works:

The process of getting PDFs to your iPad is a little wonky at this point because you have to use an Aji provided reader software that is running on a computer– in other words, you can’t just download a PDF directly to the iPad at this point.  I suspect there are some ways to work around this a bit with Dropbox and the like, but I haven’t figured it out.

What’s also nice is the annotations stay on the document when I transfer it back to my desktop computer and vice-versa, at least using Preview– I haven’t tried Adobe Reader or tried it on a Windoze computer yet. Assuming it does work as well with Adobe Reader though, I’m thinking that I might be able to use this to mark-up/comment on student work too, just making this that much more useful for me. It’s on sale now for $7 (the regular price is $10) and worth every cent.

Of course, if you just want to read PDFs, the iPad does that with no problems at all as it is, and you can extend the functionality of your reading experience quite a bit for $1 with goodiware.com’s Goodreader.  It doesn’t annotate, but it will read darn near anything and it is easy to get stuff– download, synching, etc.  Here’s a demo video from some folks at Tidbits:

I suspect these two apps will either join forces or copy each other, and when they do, both apps will be that much better.  As it is, iAnnotate is “killer” for me.

The other (potentially) killer apps that might in and of itself justify an iPad purchase for the academic-type is the various book applications. Now, there are books and then there are “books” which are really applications.  There’s already a lot out there on books as delivered by Apple’s iBook app or Amazon’s Kindle; Kathleen Fitzpatrick has a nice write-up about both on ProfHacker here. Basically, iBook or Kindle for the iPad (that’s right, you don’t need a Kindle to read Kindle books– just the free app for either the iPhone or the iPad) pours the “stuff” of a book into these apps so you can read it very much like you would the old-fashioned paper kind.  iBook has the advantage of being able to display color, but otherwise, it’s pretty similar to the Kindle.

Since the format for iBook is the open format ePub, I think we’re getting closer to electronic textbooks, and I’m talking about textbooks from both the big publishers and individuals.  It is not particularly hard to convert stuff into the ePub format, and readers can read these things on all kinds of devices, including iPads.  I’ll probably be converting my own textbook to an ePub format over the summer, just for the heck of it.

But what I’m more excited about are books that are actually applications.  I’ve played around with two examples of what I mean here so far.  There’s a couple of Dr. Seuss books adapted to the iPhone/iPad by Oceanhouse Media.  Here’s a video of this working on the iPhone (it’s obviously similar on the iPad):

The other app that has really blown me away with this stuff (though I will admit it is a little buggy at this point, too) is The Elements: A Visual Exploration which is the first product from Touch Press.  It is an intensely multimedia experience of the Periodic Table– sound, moving images, links to Wolfram |Alpha stuff, on and on and on.   Here’s a little video for that:

In my view, these sort  of book apps have the real potential to revolutionize publishing and make things like electronic textbooks worthwhile.  The applicability with the sciences is obvious, but imagine a literary anthology that includes all sorts of multimedia or composition books that have various writing tools for writing (citation tools, for example) embedded right in them.  Seemingly every computers and writing anthology that  has come out in recent years has promised some sort of “beyond the page” experience in the form of a web site or whatever; well, now all that multimedia that we keep writing old-fashioned books about can truly be a part of the experience.

And here’s the thing: as far as I can tell, books as apps would completely eliminate the used textbook market, meaning that whole gimmick of coming out with a “new edition” every two years just to keep making money on new books could go away.  Eliminate that and the expense of production and textbooks might even become cheaper– well, might, assuming the textbook business is actually willing or able to change their business model and drop their prices for these kinds of books.

Anyway, that’s what I’m seeing after a week.  Get back to me in a year and see if any of this is remotely right, or maybe the iPad and its inevitable competitors will produce an entirely new need/killer app.

Six years ago, I wrote on my blog (one that is about 3 versions removed) answers to some of the questions that Chabon considers in the opening pages of his essay here:  “Should I get an MFA in Creative Writing?” I pretty much agree with everything I said then and it’s still available via the wayback machine web archives.  But this is all on my mind this morning because of the 20 year thing.  When I was at the CCCCs last week, I got a ride to the Bedford/St. Martin’s party with Cheryl Ball, who was also in Virginia Commonwealth’s MFA program, but exactly 10 years after me, and I told her how I was reminded that I graduated from the program 20 years ago this year.  Her jaw dropped.  I know.  Maybe it’s something about the sound of “twenty” that sounds more serious than, say, “nineteen.”

I don’t know what this all means, other than I’m getting old (and tomorrow is my birthday).  Annette and I were discussing mid-life crises a bit ago and she was wondering if I was going to have one.  I don’t think so for all kinds of reasons, though I do wish that I had managed in the last 20 years to actually write and publish a novel.  This is not a regret, really.  Putting aside talent/abilities for a moment (I would rather not face the question of whether or not I had/have “what it takes”), I decided a long time ago that I enjoy steady and reasonably paying work far too much to live the kind of life it takes to get a first novel off the ground.  And I also of course like the idea of teaching and doing more academic sorts of work, obviously.  I still write lots, and, as I mention in my older post about getting an MFA, I think my experiences in a creative writing program helped me a lot with the academic writing I’ve been doing since the MFA.

I think this is probably true for the vast majority of folks I knew back in those MFA days.  Through the blessing and curse that is Facebook, I’ve managed to connect and reconnect with a lot of the people I knew back then, and, as far as I can tell, most of them have morphed into real jobs of one sort or another.  In that sense, I think the MFA has turned out to be a lot like a lot (most?) college degrees:  you start in a place with a set of lofty goals and dreams, and then, after one thing leads to another, you end up in a different place.

Anyway, earlier today via Facebook and Twitter, I came across this CHE article by Thomas “not his real name” Benton, “Graduate School in the Humanities: Just Don’t Go.” It’s an article about why getting a PhD in “the humanities” in general is a bad idea, and it comes on the heels of a number of articles about how dreadful the job market is for academics at the MLA and, as this piece in Inside Higher Ed suggests, fields like history and economics as well.  I agree with at least two things in Benton’s article:

• A lot of potential graduate students in his and my generation received bad advice.  “Having heard rumors about unemployed Ph.D.’s, some undergraduates would ask about job prospects in academe, only to be told, “There are always jobs for good people.” If the students happened to notice the increasing numbers of well-published, highly credentialed adjuncts teaching part time with no benefits, they would be told, “Don’t worry, massive retirements are coming soon, and then there will be plenty of positions available.” The encouragement they received from mostly well-meaning but ill-informed professors was bolstered by the message in our culture that education always leads to opportunity.”  I think that’s spot-on, and it makes me glad that my entry into graduate work in the late 198os was in an MFA program– not that that was a great career move, but the stakes were a lot lower than a PhD, and it was useful in lots of other ways.
• Getting a job as a professor– particularly a humanities/literature professor– is not as easy as getting the degree, and getting the degree isn’t that easy either.  “They don’t know that you probably will have to accept living almost anywhere, and that you must also go through a six-year probationary period at the end of which you may be fired for any number of reasons and find yourself exiled from the profession. They seem to think becoming a humanities professor is a reliable prospect — a more responsible and secure choice than, say, attempting to make it as a freelance writer, or an actor, or a professional athlete — and, as a result, they don’t make any fallback plans until it is too late.”  Also very true, and I like the comparison of being a professor to these other less than “sure thing” professions.  You want a “sure thing” at a job where you can make good money, live almost anywhere, work on your schedule (within reason), and help people?  Be a nurse.

But as I skimmed and reskimmed the article during my day, while I was putting together the previously mentioned syllabi for English 328 and English 516, I got to thinking a bit more.

First off, what Benton (or whatever his real name is here) is saying is pretty much similar to what I wrote on my old blog almost exactly six years ago on my old blog in this post, “The Happy Academic, Part III:  ‘Should I get a PhD?’ (an answer in 3 parts).” Among other things, I point out in that post that the market in literature has been crappy for a long, long time.  True, the current great recession is hitting all of academia quite hard right now, but I don’t think it is much of an exaggeration to suggest that the academic employment prospects for those with PhDs in literature have been “less than great” since the mid 1970s.  So while it is true that the market for literature professors is grim, this isn’t exactly new.

Second, it’s pretty clear that what Benton means by “the humanities” is literature, or rather “Literature.”  The premise here is that everyone who teaches in an English department teaches American, British, or Medieval Literature, with a few obligatory comp/rhet classes.  But those times have changed, at least in departments like mine.  My department has about the same number of faculty now as it did 30 or so years ago. The difference nowadays is that the faculty are much more diverse– comp/rhet faculty, English ed faculty, linguists, journalist/PR faculty, creative writing faculty, and literature faculty. And even though faculty in English departments routinely forget this, there are lots of other “humanities” besides “English,” some of which traditionally have better employment options– communications immediately comes to mind.

Again, I’m not disagreeing that the academic job market in humanities and other fields is bad right now and that the job market in Literature has been bad for a long time; I’m just disputing the definition of “humanities.”

Speaking of the definition of humanities here:  someone I was reading today– I think Cynthia Davidson, but I’m not sure– pointed out that it seems kind of odd that CHE would run this piece lamenting the prospects of academic success in the humanities when just last week they were praising the possibility of the digital humanities. Which again raises questions about some definitions.

In the end, I think that Doug Downs’ comment on my earlier Facebook post is right:  to paraphrase, Benton is just kinda crabby and bitter, and he sounds crabby in that midlife crisis/post-tenure/”is that all there is?” sorta way.  It’s easy enough to be bitter about almost any job I suppose, but it does make me wonder what’s eating Benton.  Is it just that he was reminded once again that the prospect for new Literature PhDs is still terrible, or is it his own problems? Every job (and let’s not forget this– being a college professor is a “job”) has its downsides. But considering the fact that I was able to work today at home, online, and in sweat pants– not to mention I actually was able to do what I like to do– I kind of feel like Benton might be whining a bit.  As I like to say, it beats shoveling coal.