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Just to recap a bit: Thursday turned out to be the last day of the Jacksonville conference for me, and things were both less and more mysterious. I went to an excellent session in podcasting and student video projects in history and humanities courses presented by Deborah Vess from Georgia College and State University. Vess was the winner of the “grand prize” for her presentation: $5,000. No kidding. She gave a great talk held at a very non-stressing hour of 11 am. I linked to a couple of things she mentioned on Friday. And yet there was only about a dozen or fewer people there. Mysterious.

And who was the second keynote speaker at this international conference about education, learning, and technology in higher education? Why, Carl “All the President’s Men” Bernstein, of course. The mystery continues. He didn’t talk much about education, learning, and/or technology, but he did have some interesting things to say about politics and the like. Anyway, I spent much of the rest of the afternoon attempting to get caught up some school stuff and to get some exercise by walking around the Jacksonville riverfront.

Had I known ahead of time that there was nothing really scheduled for Friday morning I wanted to see and that my presentation was going to be on Wednesday, I would have preferred to have spent Friday traveling back home. But I didn’t know any of that when I made the reservations, so I rented a car (out of my own pocket, I should point out) and drove around various beaches and in St. Augustine. I uploaded some pictures from that day and a few from Jacksonville here.

Highlights? Well, there’s a state park between Jacksonville and St. Augustine called Guana River State Park that has the longest undeveloped beach I’ve ever seen in Florida; a pleasant drive indeed. St. Augustine was quite the tourist trap with actual old and historic buildings mingling in with ye olde towne t-shirt shoppe. And, because I know that Will would have wanted me to go, I even managed to get myself sucked into a visit to the Ripley’s Believe it or Not! Museum. Here’s the movie:

A few links I came across in various ways the last couple of days before I get on to the conference business of the day, which is a trip to the beach:

• Mike Rose’s Blog.
• This article about podcasting turning into publishing. One of the points I think I want to make in my book project (oh yeah, that pesky book project… almost forgot about that…) is that one of the logical transitions/signs of success of a blog is the blog’s author gets some kind of book deal. So this makes sense to me.
• The design code rap:
  
• EveryZing. I haven’t played with this yet, but apparently, it’s an effort at creating a search engine that can look at multimedia for information. I heard about this at a presentation yesterday by Deborah Vess, who talked about…
• … this, Apple + iPods @ GCSU, which is about a pretty large and interesting Podcasting/videocasting initiative at Georgia College and State University.

I think I would prefer to actually be leaving for the airport today, but when I booked this trip, I didn’t know exactly when the conference presentations were going to happen and I didn’t realize that there’s almost nothing on the program Friday. So as long as I’m here, I think I’ll find out what St. Augustine is like.

Let me first be very clear: this mystery conference in Jacksonville has actually turned out to be a pretty good thing. I went to some good panels this morning and this afternoon, I had some nice chats with various folks, mostly from the community college world, my presentation went pretty well, and I got to catch up a bit with at least one friendly face I recognized from the computers and writing conference world. So it has been a much better conference than I had expected, and I am looking forward to some of the sessions tomorrow.

But it has still been kind of weird.

First off, the sessions this morning that I attended had some pretty small audiences– which is fine, frankly. That’s typical for academic conferences, and I just kind of assumed this is kind of a small conference overall. But when I went to the luncheon banquet, I was rather surprised to see a rather large ballroom with somewhere around 800 or so people in it, complete with a big dais of distinguished people. It was odd; I was just wondering where the heck all these people came from.

Then there was the mini-monolith. Before the keynote speech by Marc Prensky (the first 20 minutes of which were pretty good; the second 20 minutes which were kinda problematic; and the last 20 minutes of which were probably unnecessary), they announced the awards for the conference. Now, one of the reasons I was sent by folks at EMU to this conference in the first place was that I was the EMU nominee for an “Award for Innovative Excellence in Teaching, Learning and Technology.” So I knew I was going to get something, and I also knew that there was 40 or so other winners. But I wasn’t expecting this:

This trophy is pretty cool, but it seems rather dangerous. It’s made out of marble, it’s about eight and half inches high and about three and a half inches in circumference, it is cut so it has a rather sharp point at top, and has got to weigh 10 pounds. Gian Pagnucci (a fellow winner, btw) and I were talking at dinner about this, and we both seriously wondered if you could actually take this thing onto an airplane in carry-on luggage. I mean, I have no doubt that you could most definitely brain someone with this thing if you really wanted to. I’m a little worried about what kind of damage it’s liable to cause in my checked suitcase.

Well, it’s the thought that counts, right?

Tomorrow, more mysteries await.

As I mentioned yesterday, I’m at this something of a mystery conference and listening to a guy talking about a laptop campus program at Cal State San Bernardino. It’s potentially pretty interesting to me because while CSU-SB is a lot smaller than EMU, the profile of what the school is like is pretty similar to EMU. I think this is a guy I should talk to at some point. One of the points he just made: the main complaint that various powers-that-be on his campus (e.g., faculty senate, tech committees, provosts, etc.) was concern about that one poor student who just can’t afford a laptop no matter what. So the solution they came up with was they collected old but still decent laptops from other institutional resources. So far, they’ve loaned out one.

Another fun-fact: 70% of the students at CSU-SB are on financial aid. At the same time, some huge percentage of students had computers, over 70% had high speed internet access where they lived, and over half of the students already owned a laptop before they were required to buy one. Again, given that CSU-SB has a similar profile of students at EMU, I bet that a survey would be about the same.

But a couple of other things I came across via my feed that kind of connect to the conference and that’s just kind of interesting:

• “Analysis: How multimedia can improve teaching,” from eNews (which features an annoying registration feature), which is about this Cisco study available via pdf here. I’ve only browsed through it; it looks very science-y and statistics and stuff, and kind of potentially interesting and useful.
• “Margaret Spellings, Where Are You?” from Inside Higher Ed. It’s basically an article about all sorts of different assessment tools going on around the country with all kinds of different universities. I know we’ve got a couple of different initiatives about assessment at EMU, and what I find reassuring about the article is that the efforts of higher ed on this already might end up fending off federally mandated standards.

After I updated my Facebook status by pointing out I was in Jacksonville, Florida, my friend emailed me via Facebook and asked why. Good question.

Well, for reasons that are too complicated to go into now, the short version is that I’m at the 19th International Conference on College Teaching and Learning because EMU said that they would pay my way. So I figured it’d be a chance to represent EMU and get a trip to Florida near the end of my quasi-sabbatical.

So far, the trip has been kind of a mystery. Jacksonville has to date struck me as kind of a strange place. Most of the conversation with the cab driver from the airport to the hotel revolved around the cab driver’s love of soup. Downtown Jacksonville seems kind of like a cross between Richmond and Detroit in that it is a bunch of big office buildings– banks, telecom companies, insurance companies, etc.– and some weird and seemingly failed urban revitalization efforts. Just down the riverfront from the hotel is a “mall” that reminds me a lot of this place in Richmond that had a reasonably successful food court and a bunch of empty store fronts. There is a Hooter’s, though. And– I swear to God this is true– there’s even a monorail. I might take a ride yet this trip.

As for the conference itself: well, I’ll get a better sense tomorrow, but right now, it too is a real… mystery. I had never heard of this conference before I got myself involved in it this year, and I don’t recognize a single name in the program. I went to a little reception thing this evening, and I very much felt oddly out of place. There is some interesting abstracts in the program, and I guess I’ll find out more about this whole thing tomorrow and Thursday. Though I am also looking forward to finding out more about St. Augustine, which is my trip for Friday. Stay tuned.

… you turn on the radio and it says it is 3 degrees. I think I miss Alabama (or even Bowling Green, KY) already.

A few random thoughts from Bowling Green, KY, where Will and I are staying at the halfway point on our return from Orange Beach, AL, to Ypsi:

• Will and I actually started with a detour to the beach because, as we were leaving, I was struck by the fact that we had spent so little time near the Gulf. So we went to a park that was way out of our way and went down the long beach and touched the water, which was warmer than I thought it would be.
• There’s a disturbing number of newish sushi and/or Japanese steak places in rural Alabama. And when I think of rural Alabama, I think….
• When driving in the midwest/northeast, I scan the lower end of the FM dial in search of a public radio station. In Alabama, this section of the radio spectrum is dominated by Christian radio. I dunno, that’s a weird contrast to me.
• Alabama is one long-assed state, like 400 miles from bottom to top. That’s a lot of, um, sweet home.
• I only ate BBQ once on this trip, and it was just okay.
• The Jack Daniels distillery was a very tempting stop, but it was 25-30 miles off the Interstate, and that’s a lot of miles/time to spend on a beverage I don’t regularly drink. Now if it was a scotch….
• Bowling Green, KY, is kind of similar in some interesting ways to Bowling Green, OH. It’s kind of in the middle of nowhere, it has a blue collar tang to it (they make corvettes here) has a university, and it does not appear to have a decent restaurant (and thus room service pizza, which isn’t bad). Will and I drove around and did see a lot of pretty old houses.
• The pool and hot tub at this hotel has a saline solution instead of chlorine for some reason. I got into the hot tub, so I started and end the day in salt water.

Anyway, tomorrow drive-drive-drive and then home.

We started out Saturday morning with benigets, a little driving around, and then out to the Fort Morgan State Park, which is out at the end of one of the barrier islands under Mobile. This was Will’s idea. While driving around and looking at beaches and stuff, the grandparents were chatting about things we could do. They mentioned Fort Morgan, Prince William said “this is a good idea,” and off we were go, 30 or so minutes later.

Actually, it was a good idea. It’s a very old Fort, dating back from the war of 1812, and involved in some Civil War stuff. It had been “updated” over the years as a defensive post during WWI and WWII (I think) with some concrete bunkers and batteries for big cannons and stuff. It looked like the kind of place that would be a cool set to make a student movie. Some great views, but I was surprised to see dozens of off-shore oil rigs out there. If you look carefully over Will’s left shoulder, you can see one.

Went to lunch, and then we went on a dolphin cruise on this boat. I was a little dubious of the whole thing, especially since I do not enjoy boating in any shape and/or form. But it was a very pleasant day and a pleasant ride. We saw a surprising number of dolphins, and a bunch of them even ended up chasing after the boat and jumping out of the water.

Here’s some video; it doesn’t really do the experience justice though:

That night, we went to an extremely popular faux redneck place called Lulu’s where the entertainment included a band made up of guitar, harmonica, bongo-like drumkit, and tuba. One of their songs was “I Hope There’s a Trailerpark in Heaven,” or something like that, which fit well with a song I heard earlier in the day that had the line “It’s snowbird season, why we can’t shoot ‘em?” (BTW, here’s a link to a bizarre video where this song is set to a clip from the cartoon series Teen Titans). It kind of sums up the whole area down here, really. It’s a land where Jeff “you might be a redneck if…” Foxworthy is surly worshiped like a God.

The big highlight of today was a trip to the Naval Aviation Museum in Pensacola. We took a tour of the main floor of the museum, and Will was just enamored with the retired pilot tour guide, hanging on every single little word. A lot of our fellow tour patrons felt the same way, basically because many were either ex-military folks or just airplane/Navy geeks. One guy was mumbling to himself about the connections between the various planes and Star Wars and Star Trek. Another guy kept nodding in agreement with everything the tour guide said. Or maybe it was a nervous tick, I don’t know.

There was also a bus tour through a parking lot full of planes they couldn’t get into the building. The tour guide was just horrible, but despite that, this was one of the highlights of the trip for me. For this part of the tour featured this plane:

Don’t recognize it? Well, you remember when Bush landed that plane on the carrier and declared “mission accomplished” with the Iraq war, right? Of course you do, but here’s some footage from Fahrenheit 911 as a refresher. Well, guess what happened to the plane?

Yep, there it is. I dunno, but it seems a pretty preposterous place for the plane used in one of the most dubious stunts in recent American history, if you ask me. “Mission Accomplished” sent to the back lot of a museum.

Anyway, here’s a link to a flickr set of the trip so far. There will probably be some more, but I need to get caught up with some school work over the next day or so first. Well, that, and play some golf.

As I type this, I just got done looking through some materials for my online class while at the condo my parents have rented in Orange Beach, Alabama– aka, the Redneck Riviera, or, if you believe that it is only the panhandle of Florida, near it. A few thoughts/highlights so far:

• We didn’t get as far as we would have preferred on Thursday because a) it was Valentine’s and Will was not about to leave school and miss out on the candy, b) Survivor was on at 8 pm (must-see watching for Will), c) Lost was on at 9 pm (must-see watching for me– and I thought it was excellent), and d) traffic in Ohio really sucked.
• I was rather surprised at the number of accidents and other emergency vehicle personnel I saw on the road. Of course, considering that I drove just shy of 1,000 miles in two days, maybe it isn’t surprising.
• Possible stop on the way home: Jack Daniels. Just for the tour, people.
• The only real photo op so far was at a rest stop near Huntsville, Alabama, where they made these rockets:

  

  I also like Will next to this proclamation:

  

  Apparently, it’s the state motto. But shouldn’t that be “We dare to defend our rights?” Am I missing something here?

• Biggest food screw-up of the trip: passing on the local BBQ place in Birmingham in favor of what I thought would be easier and faster to eat while driving food at Burger King.
• You know, I see plenty of older cars like mine with lots and lots of bumper stickers on the streets of Ypsi-Arbor. You don’t see as many on the Interstate. And you don’t see any other Darwin stickers down here, either.

Anyway, a combo of some fun and some work for the next few days. I’m sure there will be more updates.

Loyal readers of my official blog will recall that I was on what I referred to as “Sabbatical Lite” last term, an arrangement in which I was taking one semester sabbatical and splitting it up over two semesters. It had its ups and downs in the winter term, it was beginning to feel like it was slipping away from me this term, and my conclusion was that doing this was basically a bad idea.

But I’m starting to rethink this, at least a bit. It probably wasn’t a good idea, but it might not have been a bad idea, either.

For example, I am starting to get into a routine this term where I am able to devote much more time to research stuff for four or five days of the week (including weekends, of course). Not that I’ve been incredibly productive as of late, but I’m still probably doing more on the BAWS project than I would have been able to do under normal teaching load circumstances.

Example #2: roadtrip.

Since I am teaching but one class online and since the administrative stuff has kind of settled down for the time-being, Will and I are embarking an epic journey to see my parents, who stay this time of year on the gulf coast of Alabama. The way I figure it, I will have pretty robust Internet access the whole time, meaning I can still teach and do most of my administrative duties. And as far as the canceled office hours go: well, that’s part of the release I get for being on sabbatical lite.

Annette, since she is not enjoying the pleasures of sabbatical lite, is staying home. She’ll have to work obviously, but I’m sure she’ll get her own “vacation” of sorts from Will and I.

Expect some photos and videos from the road, btw.