Category: Travel

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Napa, 2010

We’re about to conclude the first leg of our trip out west, the Napa Valley part of things. Here’s a link to the Flickr set of photos and one video; Annette also uploaded a bunch of stuff to Facebook, but I’ll worry about getting those pictures downloaded and uploaded to Flickr when I get home.

A couple of quick thoughts before Ashland:

The idea of this trip, more or less, was to cash in our frequent flyer miles (meaning the flights cost us about $40 or so) and to take a trip to see where Will was born and where Annette and I started our post-PhD program lives, Ashland, Oregon. But first, Napa.

Our flight into Sacramento was uneventful, but we didn’t get to the hotel/motel until almost 1 am west coast time or 4 am east coast time, so our first day in Napa was pretty quiet, actually. We stopped in downtown Napa for lunch– good food, but not much reason to stop there tourism-wise. Drove past wineries, stopped at Bouchon Bakery for lovely pastries and coffee, and then got to our hotel, a Best Western in Calistoga, CA. Great place, actually– lovely little town, nice hotel, reasonably priced, etc.

Tuesday night we went to Bouchon, which is a Thomas Keller restaurant in Yountville. I would have preferred going to Ad Hoc (because I have a cookbook from there), but it was closed both Tuesday and Wednesday. And The French Laundry, well, that would have been a little out of our budget. Bouchon was great, and surprisingly accessible and not crazy expensive. We have spent as much or more in a couple of different restaurants in Ann Arbor, and this was much better. Will had a great mussels dish, Annette had a bib lettuce salad that she thought was the best ever (and some good lobster bisque), and I pigged out over some deliciously fatty pork shoulder.

And then Wednesday, we got up and really had tourism proper. Napa Valley is a little tricky with a 12 year-old; as Annette put it, it’s sort of like how adults feel about a place like Chuck E. Cheese: sure, there’s stuff adults can do there, but the place is really made for kids. So is the case with wine country. As a result, we ended up keeping it pretty simple and mostly kid-friendly. We went to the California petrified forest and the “Old Faithful” of California; both were pretty much tourist-traps, but kinda fun. We went to the Sterling winery, which has the kid-friendly attraction of a gondola ride from the parking lot to the winery itself– that was pretty cool, and the views from that place were spectacular.

But the real surprise and hit of the day was Castello Di Amorosa, which is basically this pet/vanity project of a guy who has been active in the Napa Valley wine world for a long long time. Check out the link and the pictures to see what I mean; but basically, I would say it was an all-around hit for our group. I thought it was going to be super cheesy, but actually, it was a really well-done castle reproduction, and as some of the picture suggest, it looks quite a bit like quite a few things in Italy. We had a great guy serving us up too much wine in the tasting room, and it was pretty good wine, too.

We didn’t get to see a lot more than that, unfortunately, but what we saw was lovely. Oh, almost forgot– we did get a chance to go into the the west coast branch of the the Culinary Institute of America, which has about the best kitchen tool/toy/porn store I’ve ever been in. I ended up buying a couple of great looking CIA cookbooks, which are not the kind of thing you can typically get at a Borders or something.

And now on to Ashland. I’m finishing this post now from here, and I am sure I’ll photos to upload in a few days.

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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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Returning to Gulf Coast Alabama one last time

I’m writing this about 20 minutes before Will and I have to leave for the airport to go back to Detroit while sitting on the patio of my parents’ condo, and it occurs to me that this is pretty much the first time on this trip where it’s been even remotely warm enough to sit outside for any amount of time.  Jeesh.

Will was off school this week and because I’m teaching online (and thus a little more flexible in my whereabouts) and because we didn’t spend as much time with my parents at Christmas as we probably should have, Will and I came down here for a few days.  Annette, unfortunately, still was teaching/working, and (even more unfortunate) watching over a kinda sick dog.

It’s been a pleasant enough visit. The highlight clearly was Mardi Gras, which was a much bigger deal down here in Southern Alabama than I thought.  We didn’t make it into Mobile for the big parades, which was a shame since they claim to be “the original” Mardi Gras (take that, copy-cat New Orleans!), but the local parade through Gulf Shores was a lot of fun. Here’s a link to some picts; here’s my favorite chunks of video, me catching one of the things commonly thrown from the floats, moon pies:

Will and I also spent a very cool afternoon climbing around the battleship USS Alabama and the submarine USS Drum while my parents stayed back and read.  At first, I thought my parents were being party-poopers, but once I got on board, I understood:  it was a lot of fun, but the chutes and ladders and tiny doors mean it’s a little like climbing around in the tubes at Chuck E. Cheese.

And we saw an old fort, and we were at a thing where they shot off an old canon… wow, very military themed, I guess.  I “ran”/walked one day on the beach, which was pretty good exercise albeit kind of cold.

All in all, a nice enough visit, though I don’t know if I’ll be back anytime soon.  My parents are talking about going someplace different next year, and to be honest, I have a hard time making seeing me and Annette making our own vacation kind of trip here. But the moon pies are good.

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Missouri et al trip recap

It’s funny because while I haven’t been here for the last week, I spent plenty of time online here, here, and here. In the real world, I was off on the every other year Krause family summer get together in Lake of the Ozarks, Missouri.  Here’s a set of pictures on Flickr; here’s a few highlights:

  • Spent the first night in St. Louis, where we enjoyed fried toasted ravioli and red sauce Italian food.  The next day, we went to the Arch (of course) and then City Museum, which I have to say is actually the “must see” attraction of the two, IMO.  There was some fun and funky stuff in St. Louis; I’m looking forward to going back when the CCCCs is there in few years.
  • My parents rented a house on the Lake of the Ozarks for the 10 adults and eight grandkids.  On the plus-side:  the house was pretty much big enough, pretty nice, had great views, and the water was accessible down many many stairs.  On the down-side:  it was down a winding road,  another winding road, a gravel road a gravel/dirt road, and finally a “holy shit, you want me to drive down that?!” gravel/dirt road.  Which meant it was about 35 minutes from the main road, which was where most of “civilization” was located.
  • The other down-side (which wasn’t exactly a surprise) was there was no easy internet access, which made teaching my online classes somewhat challenging for the week.  Surprisingly though, I think I pulled it off with a couple of trips to a Panera’s and the iPhone.  I did finally start playing around with iPhone internet tethering, which worked fantastic for me but which makes me paranoid.  I’m just worried I’m going to get some kind of huge charge added to my bill.
  • We had fun with the family (Will especially had fun playing with the cousins), the weather was much cooler and more reasonable than I was expecting, I got a chance to play golf a couple times, everyone but my father and me got a chance to go out on the water on a rented boat, had a lot of fun going to Ha Ha Tonka State Park, and we had some nice views of the lake.  Having said that, Lake of the Ozarks seems mostly a place to go and get on a boat, drink beer, and go “wooo!”  A little country/hillbilly-ish for my tastes, generally speaking.
  • Then it was off to Chicago.  Went out with Troy and Lisa on Friday, which was great though our effort to get into Frontera Grill was thwarted by a 2+ hour wait.  Maybe next time.  (BTW, fun fact I didn’t know until I visited his web site:  Rick Bayless did at least some PhD work in Anthropological Linguisitcs at U of M.  Go figure).  Instead, we went to Vong’s Thai Kitchen, which was quite nice.
  • Got up the next morning and had a run/walk through Millennium Park as I went and picked up breakfast stuff for Will and Annette.  It was one of those mornings that made me think living in Chicago would be pretty cool.
  • Then onto the Museum of Science and Industry, mainly for Harry Potter:  The Exhibition.  I’d like to tell you to check out the pictures I took, but there was a definite NO PHOTOGRAPHY rule.  Despite that, it was a pretty cool collection of costumes and props and set stuff from the movie, probably more for the “hard core” fan (like my wife and son), but still enjoyable for the likes of me.  One of the tour dudes there told us that the movie makers working on something actually came back to get something from the exhibit, I guess to work on the current film.  The only down-side was we once again were not able to see the coal mine exhibit– or maybe a better way of putting it is we weren’t willing to wait in line for an hour or more.  Again, next time.
  • Managed to spend some time getting lost in some of the less desirable neighborhoods on the southside and near the Chicago Skyway Bridge, got stuck in traffic in Gary, etc.

All in all, a good trip.  Now it’s a couple weeks of “normalness” at home before the Traverse City experience.

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And other Computers and Writing highlights

I was going to wrap this all up in my previous post on Twitter, but since that got kind of long and very Twitter-centric, I thought I’d post one last time about C&W09 here. Some of the other highlights:

  • Before the Ganley keynote, Nick Carbone and I worked on incorporating some video from Matt Barton (who was originally going to come to C&W this year but then he didn’t, I think because of travel fund issues) into my part of our talk about textbook publishing, “Textbook 2.0: Open Source Textbooks and Multimodal Composition Programs.” There is a podcast recording of it on the C&W 09 web site– one of these days, I’ll connect that audio with my slides and post them here. Anyway, it was a pretty well-attended session in my estimation, and I enjoyed presenting with Nick.
  • I was “back to back” presentation boy at this year’s conference as I followed the textbook presentation with my contribution to “Sustainable Blogging: Problems and Promises for School, Work, and Play.” I set up a new web site/blog, “Blogs as Writerly Spaces,” to host stuff about this research, and I have a link to my presentation script here. It was a smaller crowd than the textbook talk (which says to me that I’m a lot more interested in my research in blogging at this stage than most other people), but some really good presentations from my Indiana University of Pennsylvania colleague and friend Gian Pagnucci, along with some IUP grad students, Sabatino Mangini and Jessica Schreyer.
  • Friday night was the banquet, which was fine but not that exciting one way or the other, and then it was out to the Davis nightlife with various C&W folks.
  • Slept in Saturday morning (well, sort of slept in– I never did get my time issues straight out there) and managed to walk through the Davis farmer’s market on the way to the conference. I debated getting some beautiful looking morel mushrooms, but I wasn’t sure I could get them back on the plane in my carry-on luggage. Probably, but I didn’t want to chance it.
  • Then to the conference and I went to see “Researching Fully Online Instruction: Assessment, Pedagogy, and a Sustainable Theory of Hybrid Online Learning,” which was a panel by some fine folks at the University of California at Santa Barbara. Given the discussions we’ve had here in my program about teaching online, I guess there are two things I found striking. One speaker, Christopher Dean, presented about how the research suggests there is “no significant difference” in what students learn in online classes versus similar face to face classes. There are some big problems with these kinds of claims, including a kind of fuzzy sense of what exactly it is we are measuring when we describe “learning.” But I will say that in my own experiences his claims seem accurate to the extent that the writing projects and other graded “artifacts” students produce in online classes are pretty much the same as those students produce in face to face classes, and that even includes things like the collaborative video projects and such. More important to me though was that two of these folks, Randi Browning and Kathy Patterson, spoke about their experiences teaching online for the first time. I wish these folks would come and talk to some of my EMU colleagues because I think they would be a lot more persuasive than me in speaking about what it’s “like” to make the leap of faith to teach online.
  • Went to Bill Cope’s keynote, which was fantastic, in my mind: very solid theoretically, well-put together and polished, pushing the edges of what counts as technology, etc. Interestingly, I think he was making the same basic point as Ganley; but besides the delivery, I think the differences had to do with tools than it had to do with concepts.
  • Then I took a conference break to go grade– I was and remain woefully behind– and I had a solo lunch and grading session at Crepeville. Very nice, and I got a fair amount of work done, too.
  • I attended another panel after my grading lunch (a pretty good one– G1, “Hybrid Writing Classes: Literacy, Dialogues, and Intellectual Property”), I went to Town Hall III, where I was on the panel. This was an odd experience. First off, I was pretty unprepared compared to the other people on the panel, I guess because what I thought I was supposed to do mostly was react to the stuff I had seen at the conference. I wasn’t expecting to have a little speech written up. And second, as I was sitting there next to Cindy Selfe and Kathy Yancey (not to mention some other heavy-hitters), I most distinctly had the feeling of being a little like Kathy Griffin on “the D list.” But it was a good conversation and a good opportunity for me. I tried to get Cindy to sign onto Twitter with no luck though.
  • Then it was an art exhibit that actually was kinda cool (I have some video to upload sooner than later) and then bowling. I took lots of pictures that are here, but my favorite is the one video I took:

    And this was followed by a comparatively quiet night on the town.

  • And just to prove that the conference isn’t over until you’re long LONG gone: I ended up riding back on the plane with a fellow conference goer and right behind this group of drunk women. It’s a long story, and it was a long plane flight, and I’m still running behind….

All in all, a fantastic C&W this year. I thought Davis was great, I think I actually went to more panels than I’ve gone to in a long time, and I have to say I enjoyed thoroughly having my own room (though it cost too much). Carl Whithaus and friends did a fantastic job, and I’m looking forward to next year’s conference at Purdue.

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C&W 09, in the midst of it

I’m actually attending a session right now about “Hacking Spaces” by Douglass Walls, Scott Schopieray, and Danielle Nicole DeVoss, but thought I’d post a few miscellaneous notes/observations:

  • I went to wine country on Thursday, which was actually more conference/technology related than you might think. For one, I went with my colleague Doug Baker (and his father and a friend of his, both of whom were very able guides) and we chatted about the conference a fair amount. For another, when we were at Francis Ford Coppola’s winery, I wandered into an exhibit that had some “Magic Lanterns” and this video that is slightly risque:

    It figures. I go to wine country and the coolest things to me are these old media technologies.

  • I was going to go to the reception for C&W last night, but I found out there was no wine/beer/etc., which kind of for me defeats the purpose of a “reception.” So I connected with Gian Pagnucci and some Indiana U of Pennsylvania folks for dinner. Lots of fun, and one of those moments that you do get from actually going to a place instead of just doing stuff online: we met a local woman who was having dinner alone and talked with her quite a bit about teaching, learning, Davis, books, reading, writing. And in the course of it, we found out she was out by herself because her husband had died a few months earlier. She had a picture of him with her and talked about how they both loved food and trains, and she liked to come here with him and listen to the trains go by.
  • Got up this morning after finally getting some sleep, and I combined a “run” with a trip to the grocery store (needed toothpaste), and leisurely got ready for the day. I’m not sharing a room at this conference, and I must say as much as I like traveling with Steve B. and/or Bill HD, I could get used to the luxury of my own room for future conferences. The one bad thing about the Hallmark Inn here in Davis– and it is a significant bad thing for me– is the wifi service is just awful. It means I’ll be even further behind when I get home. Swell.
  • Worked on one of the presentations I’m giving here with Nick Carbone for a while, and then went to the keynote. In the interest of both time and decorum, all I will say for now is I thought that Barbara Ganley’s talk was problematic, and certainly not addressed to the right audience. Had she given the spiel that she gave about “re-imaging how we can teach with technology” at NCTE or some kind of National Writing Project meeting, people would have been on their feet. Here, the reaction seemed to be a) yeah, we do that, and/or b) you’re not really engaging with the issues. But what was most fascinating was the twitter feed on this stuff. It’s ongoing and here; I suppose if you scroll down far enough, you can get the whole gist of it all.

I’m sure there will be more later. Davis, by the way, is a lovely place. It sort of seems a kind of California-ish version of Ann Arbor, that college town kind of thing with groovy restaurants and stores and stuff, only in a much more pleasant climate.

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C&W 09 prewriting/preparing post

I’m off to what is generally my favorite conference of the year, Computers and Writing, which this year is in Davis, California. It’s not one of the “big ones,” like the CCCCs or something, and it can be kind of inconsistent in terms of who attends and the overall “quality” of the experience because it is a conference that is more or less hosted by folks who are willing to host it. But it is still my favorite or one of my favorites, mainly because these are my people, so to speak.

Anyway, a few random, preparatory thoughts:

  • When I have mentioned to people “in the know” about California that this conference is going to be in Davis, the general reaction has been “oh, that’s too bad.” Well, all I know is I’m planning a trip to Napa Thursday, the weather is likely to be pretty nice (sunny, dry, low 90s during the day, 50s-60s at night), and I’ll be busy doing conference stuff most of the time anyway.
  • My usual traveling companions are not going this year, I suppose because they already had their trip to California with the CCCCs. I suspect that is true with lots of people, actually. In any event, since this is my only conference this year, I am kind of “livin’ large” with my own room and such.
  • My “main presentation” from my point of view is “Endings: The Problem of Sustained Blogging,” which is part of my ongoing blog research. I’m in the process of setting up a web site for that project, http://baws.stevendkrause.com, which is going to host some of the stuff I’ve done and will continue to do, including responses to the survey I conducted.
  • My “not main presentation” is “Fast, Free, and On the ‘Net: The Story of a Self-Published Textbook,” which is a round-table discussion called “Textbook 2.0: Open Source Textbooks in the Land of Sustainable Computing.” The table promises not to be that “round” though because Joanna bowed out and Matt had his funding cut– he’s going to maybe make a video. I’ll post stuff here when I’m done getting something together that is, well, postable. Interestingly enough, someone from a Cal-Irvine PR office called me to ask some questions about my presentation to drum up some interest locally in the conference. I guess I’d better be ready for people showing up to this one….
  • And I’m on a panel/a respondent at the “Town Hall III: @ School, Work, and Play in Freeborn.” There’s some really cool people in that group, but since it’s the last thing of the day before “dinner on your own” and bowling, I’m not exactly expecting a huge crowd. Well, maybe I’ll at least have some good people to go eat dinner with after that…
  • I’m kind of annoyed with my air travel plans because I don’t get there today until almost midnight and I won’t get home on Sunday until about 10 pm. Grrr.
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Sign up for Technology for Teaching and Learning!

In the shameless self-promotion department: if you are an undergraduate or graduate student at EMU who has an interest in technology and teaching and who likes the idea of spending a week in August in Traverse City, sign up for a class I’m teaching, ENGL 479/592: Technology for Teaching and Learning. I’ve set up a blog and a wiki for the class, though both are drafts at this point– I’m already pretty sure I’m going to make a few changes. Here’s the description I have right now:

This will be a “hands on the keyboards” workshop on using technology for the teaching and learning of writing, and it is designed for Composition, English, and Language Arts teachers K-College. We will have extensive in-class activities designed to learn how to use a variety of internet applications in present and future teaching– email, web sites, blogs, wikis, bookmarking sites, image sharing sites, podcasing, online video, and so forth. Students will build their own basic web sites and complete a post-class exercise on using technology in their teaching. No previous experience with the technologies covered in this class will be necessary.

As a “special topics” course, our regular ongoing undergraduate and graduate students could take the course as an elective. However, it is not be a suitable substitution for required courses in either the undergraduate programs in writing or the graduate program in written communication (e.g., courses like ENGL 328, ENGL 444, ENGL 516, or the “Topics In” courses in the MA program, ENGL 517, ENGL 518, ENGL 526, and ENGL 527).

The CRN for the undergrad version of the class is 41988 and the CRN for the graduate version of the class is 41989. We’ll have a month worth of online discussion starting July 1 (mostly discussing some readings about how we use technology now to teach and learn and how we want to after the class) and we’ll meet in Traverse City from August 1 through August 7.

These Traverse City classes have declined in numbers in recent years as online classes have become more workable and popular. As much as I like teaching online, I think it’s a shame because the Traverse City environment is a really great way to both teach and learn. The class is “on the bubble” in terms of getting enough students to make, so if you are reading this and are thinking that you were going to sign up eventually, do so right away! Like yesterday!

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Some thoughts on Jeff Smith, Bone, Indie Comics, and Columbus

The fam took a mini road-trip to Columbus, Ohio Friday and Saturday mainly to see The Cartoonist: Jeff Smith, Bone, and the Changing Face of Comics. I personally am not a particularly big fan of Bone and/or Jeff Smith, but the complete Bone is one of Will’s favorite books, Annette is teaching it this spring in a class, and I generally like comics, though I think I like them more in theory– that is, what they mean in terms of visual rhetoric, teaching with images and words, etc.– than I do as a fan. Though the movie made me think that Bone might be something I ought to give another chance.

One of the highlights for all us was Will getting his complete Bone signed:

Jeff Smith signing Will's copy of "Bone"

Smith was super-duper nice to everyone waiting to get stuff signed, and he chatted a bit with Will, noting that his copy of the 1300+ page well-worn book had obviously been read.

The movie itself was pretty good/kind of so-so, mainly because it was essentially a Jeff Smith love-fest/puff-piece. But I thought it was interesting in a lot of different ways. Smith had an extensive background in making animated television commercials, and that definitely had a major influence on his approach to comics and Bone in particular. Bone began as a self-published comic, and I suppose it still is self-published in the sense that Smith and his wife (and his wife seemed to be the real business brains behind the scenes) still run what appears to be a pretty lucrative operation.

What I didn’t realize before this movie was that lots of the independent/underground comics sold in places like Vault of Midnight in Ann Arbor are self-published, though obviously not on the scale of Bone. Which made me wonder why this hasn’t worked in conventional “words in a row” publishing; I mean, self-publishing a novel or a collection of short stories or poems is pretty much a good way to not be taken seriously, and while I know that’s changing a bit with some web sites, you’re still not likely to see a lot of self-published books even in locally-owned and independent book stores.

I suppose the same is true with academic writing and publishing.

Some of the difference seems to be in the materiality of the comic and the collecting fetish. There were many geeky 30 to 50 year old men waiting in line with Will to get signatures from Jeff Smith, only they were holding stacks of the individual issues of Bone or other Smith comics. In the movie, Smith and some of the other featured comic writers (including Scott McCloud, BTW) spoke a couple times about the physicality and “object-ness” of comics in a way that just isn’t the same with words-in-a-row books, IMO. Interestingly though, one of the ways that Bone caught on and one of the main ways comics continue to be promoted was/is the Internet.

As for Columbus proper: we didn’t get to see much, unfortunately. We had so-so Ohio “Mexican” food in a place in the Short North area, which looked like it would have been a fun place to hang out but which probably involved more “adult” entertainment (e.g., bars and stuff) than might have been fitting for Will. He did have fun in the hotel room though:

IMG_0135

And now it’s back to a “working holiday:” stuff around the house today, commenting/grading on papers tomorrow.