Category: Uncategorized

Zepbound, Starting Month 9

I am beginning my ninth month on Zepbound, and so far, I’ve lost around 35 pounds, which averages out to about a pound a week. When I started Zepbound in January, I had a BMI that was just on the edge of “morbidly obese;” now I’m solidly “obese.” I can now run for a mile on the track at the gym without stopping (well, my “run” is more like a jog that isn’t walking, and I am often passed by taller people who are fast-walking), a goal I’ve been trying to reach for a long time. I went to my doctor for a physical in June, and learned my cholesterol (which has been under control for a while with a statin) was even lower, and, more importantly, my AIC numbers went from pre-diabetic to normal. A couple of weeks ago, I went through my closet and drawers. I set aside almost all of my pants and jeans and went shopping for things that actually fit.

So, so far, so good. As I described in a bit more detail in my previous Zepbound post, I still have nausea and other tummy-trouble side effects for a day or two after I inject, and it has changed in subtle and not subtle ways the way I think about food. I’m also feeling like after nine months, I need to be a more conscious participant in the process. As I said before, Zepbound works for me because I’m not always hungry, and when I do sit down to eat a meal, I cannot physically eat as much as I used to be able to eat. That is still true. But if I want to get to my goal of being considered merely overweight, I’m going to need to lose at least another 25 pounds. That’s going to take a more conscious effort cut out even more snacks, late night treats, booze, etc.

Meanwhile, I finished listening to Johann Hari’s book Magic Pill, which is about these new drugs, and based on his research and own experiences on the meds— in his case, Ozempic. Hari is a Scottish writer/journalist whose fast-rising career in British media almost ended in 2011 when he was caught plagiarizing and fabricating huge elements of his stories. He made a comeback a few years later with a couple of books about addiction and depression, and also a couple of very well received Ted Talks.

I became familiar with Hari from his previous book, Stolen Focus: Why You Can’t Pay Attention. As the title suggests, it’s about the loss of attention and focus I think most of us sense in our day-to-day lives. Hari mostly blames cell phones and the intentionally addicting properties of social media, and also a host of other environmental and cultural factors. He presents the book as a literal journey: it starts with him traveling America with his nephew, and then Hari recounts his a solo trip to Provincetown, Massachusetts where he was on a social media detox and offline for several weeks. The rest of the book has him traveling the world, talking to various experts. All along the way and as a direct result of the previous plagiarism/fabrication scandals, he cites his work in detail, both in the notes in the book and on his website about the book.

For the most part, I agree with the arguments that Hari makes, though not everything— I think Hari goes too far with some of his claims about the dangers of social media and the causes of ADHD. But those disagreements were part of what made that book interesting. I assigned it in my first year composition and rhetoric classes last year, but that’s a different story. In short, Stolen Focus is a good and informative read. I’d recommend it.

Magic Pill is not.

Several reviews— notably this detailed take-down by Daniel Engber in The Atlantic— point out that in Magic Pill, Hari is slipping back into the sloppy journalism that got him in trouble before. He recycles many bits of past columns and books (I recognized a couple of these passages from Stolen Focus, complete with his nephew), and he significantly altered some of those stories to make them fit into this new book. He mixies up dates and places and people, and some of these errors are glaring. For example, Hari claims that a well-known British restaurant critic named Jay Rayner lost his love of food after being on Ozempic. Rayner posted on Twitter that that was “complete and utter bollocks.” The Telegraph did a deeper fact-checking dive into the book, and there are a lot of problems. In the end, as Marion Winik wrote in The Washington Post, Hari is constantly trying to create “ah-ha” moments out of things that anyone who has tried to lose weight— or merely eaten— already knows, like you eat less when you feel full.

Hari spends a lot of time mulling over the upsides of dramatic weight loss versus the downsides of yet still undetermined harms and the potential of needing to stay on these expensive medications for life. But in the closing chapter, I think he sums up what should be the decision making process for just about everyone with these medications in a couple sentences. To paraphrase: if you have a BMI higher than the low 30s (aka “obese”), you probably should consider trying these drugs. If you have a BMI lower than about 27 (which is the lower-end of “overweight”), you probably shouldn’t take these drugs.

What I did find interesting in listening to Magic Pill was his recounting of his experiences on Ozempic compared to mine on Zepbound. We’ve had similarly mild but persistent side-effects, and I too was surprised at how quickly it lowered my ability or desire to eat something like a Big Mac— though in his case, it’s fried chicken.

I also agree with the way Hari talks about BMI and when he gently critiques the concept of “health at every size.” Body Mass Index is far from an ideal system because of its lack of diversity and also its inability to distinguish between mass from muscles versus mass from fat, and because of its definition of “healthy” weight. I mean, for my height, BMI thinks I should weigh around 150 pounds, which is not a weight I’ve seen since middle school. At the same time, it’s kind of the best measure we’ve got. I of course agree that fat people should not be stigmatized or shamed or seen as failures because of their weight. But no one who is in the morbidly obese weight range should believe that there’s no correlation between weight and health, nor that the health problems of being too fat can be negated by only embracing body positivity.

But mostly, it’s about the differences. I began taking these drugs after years of being stuck at the same morbidly obese weight and because I did not want to develop type 2 diabetes and other health problems. Hari started taking Ozempic because he wanted to look better. As a side effect, I suppose, I’ve been pleased how Zepbound has also improved my appearance. Hari’s side effect was it improved his health.

Also, and I am surprised he never discusses this and it doesn’t come up in the reviews, Ozempic is a type 2 diabetes medication. Prescribing it “off-label” for weight loss has been common, but it also created shortages that made it a lot harder for people who actually need it for diabetes.

Hari describes a chaotic childhood where his Swiss father (who was also a chef at one point) angrily tried to force him to eat nutritious food and his mother and grandmother smuggled him junk food. He talks about how (before Ozempic, of course) he used to eat an entire bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken by himself, how he used to go on these eating binges with a friend of his who was enormously fat and who died young several years before. Hari is in his early forties, and he says he has never cooked himself anything ever, and in one scene, he describes how a friend tried to teach him how to make some simple and healthy meals and how inept he was at it. And to hear him tell it, the food industry in the UK and the US are so hopelessly hell-bent on making all of us addicted to crappy food that he literally had to go to Japan to study how the richest nation with the lowest average BMI eats real food.

How much of this is exaggerated to fit the story is unclear, but as Engber wrote in that Atlantic piece, all of Hari’s “comeback” writings and books have been obsessed with “self-control and self-destruction,” which Hari argues has been brought about by his upbringing and other social factors. In other words, Hari blames this trauma, his eating disorders, and the complete lack of available health food choices for his weight. And by implication, Hari seems to think that this is how all fat people got that way.

I don’t think this is true for me. In my teens and early twenties, I was overweight. Most people in my extended family are overweight or more. But I think there were three things that really pushed me into that “morbidly obese” range: I quit smoking over 30 years ago (still the smartest thing I’ve done for my overall health, but I almost immediately gained 20 pounds); I did not take very good care of myself in graduate school; and I got older (it’s a whole lot harder to lose a few pounds in your 50s than it is in your 30s). What I’m saying is my weight gain has been slow and steady, and it wasn’t caused by trauma or an eating disorder. I think that’s how most people get fat.

Very much like Stolen Focus, Hari calls for larger societal changes to solve the problem— in this case, changes to the food industry and also in promoting (regulating?) healthier and more nutritious diets. I agree there are some things governments can do easily (calorie and ingredient information on packages and also at the fast food counter, taxes on sugary foods, etc.), and there are some things that governments might be able to do not so easily. There is a clear correspondence between obesity and income levels in the US, so doing more to get people out of poverty would help with that.

But here’s the thing: it’s not that hard to buy food from a grocery store or a restaurant that is healthy, and it is much easier to do this now than it was just a few years ago. Detroit (and other cities like it) definitely still have food desert neighborhoods, but they also have a lot of urban farming, mobile farmers markets, and, as development has come to parts of the city like midtown, so has Whole Foods and some other chains. And yes, it’s cheaper and easier to buy and prepare processed foods and junk food, but it’s not that much cheaper and easier than buying and preparing simple meals with vegetables, fish, and (less often) meat. We don’t have to go to Japan to eat like this and none of this is new information. As Michael Pollan discovered and advised us in 2008, it’s simple: eat food (by which he means not the overly processed things), not to much, mostly plants.

Here’s the other thing that Hari never talks about, nor does anyone else trying to convince us to eat healthier: besides the undeniable convenience of fast food and processed food, these manufactured and engineered and packaged “food” products are fucking delicious. I don’t know about you, but I don’t think I eat things that are bad for me just because I have “Daddy Issues” or depression or stress, or because there are few other options. I eat chocolate and doughnuts and ice cream and bacon and other clearly not good for me foods because they still give me pleasure.

The difference is with Zepbound, I just don’t eat that stuff as often.

Switching from stevendkrause.com to here for “blogging”

This is my first post on Substack that didn’t originate at stevendkrause.com, which is where I’ve been blogging (I think people still call it that?) since 2003. So I’m a newbie here, but this ain’t my first rodeo.

To back up:

I started back in the late 1990s when weblogs were this whole new thing. It’s a format that has always appealed to me, I suppose because it merges two things I’m really interested in: writing (as a practice, a study, a profession, etc.) and emerging medias/technologies. I’ve kept a journal off and on since I was a kid, I was an English major in college, and I studied creative writing in an MFA program back in the days when I had aspirations of being the next famous novelist. I went on to a PhD in the field Composition and Rhetoric, and since 1998, I’ve been a professor at Eastern Michigan University. I mostly teach writing courses, everything from “freshman comp” to courses to MA students about how to teach writing.

I’ve also always been keen on computer stuff. I am old enough to have started writing in college with a typewriter only to switch to a computer. In my case, that was a Mac 512K with no hard drive, just floppies. I got a “real job” for a couple years after I finished my MFA and before I went on for my PhD mainly because I knew how to use PageMaker, the desktop publishing software of its day. I like gadgets (Apple fan boy forever), not to mention all things internet. I’m not a programmer or an expert about how computers (and the Internet, AI, etc.) actually work, but I’ve always been interested in how we use this technology. Plus most of my scholarship has to do with the connections between writing practices and pedagogies with technology.

Twenty-some-odd years ago, the majority of my blog posts were like social media posts, mostly links and brief commentary. When social media platforms came along, those “micro-blog” posts” ended up on Facebook (and at one point Twitter). But for longer pieces (like this, for example), I continue to write on my blog, about a post every month or so.

In academia, there has/had been debate about the value of public writing like this. Back in the day, there were a lot of articles in places like the Chronicle of Higher Education telling grad students and the untenured it’s a bad idea to have a blog because you might end up writing something that could ruin your career. As my mother-in-law who grew up behind the Iron Curtain said about life in communist East Germany, the tallest sunflowers are the ones that get their heads cut off first.

My experience has been the opposite: just about every success I’ve had as a scholar has been connected to blogging. This is not to say I can claim to have been all that successful as a scholar in my field (as a friend and former colleague likes to put it, “famous academic” is an oxymoron), but I’ve done okay. My scholarship about blogging (in the early days) lead to my first sabbatical project and some work on using blogs as a teaching tool. My blogging about MOOCs lead to an edited collection of essays, a bunch of cool speaking/conference gigs, and my single authored book on MOOCs. And in more recent years, my blogging about AI has lead to a couple of invited speaking opportunities, and who knows what’s next.

Plus it’s kind of a compulsion for me, like keeping a journal. I tried to give that up a few years ago, thinking that the daily 15-45 minutes doing that could be used doing more productive things. I couldn’t stop.

So, why the switch to Substack?

I started checking it out/noodling around with it a few months ago because it seemed to be what all the cool kids were using. I’m not planning on charging any money to read my rants, but I do like the idea that it is something a user can easily do. I can take or leave the email/newsletter feature here, personally. On the one hand, I still spend a lot of time in email and I do sometimes read the things I get from Substack subscriptions. I can see why a lot of Substack users push these newsletters, especially if they’re trying to convert free subscriptions into paid ones. On the other hand, I often delete those emails unopened. I really like the ease of the Substack interface for writing/publishing, though I have nothing at all against writing/publishing with WordPress. I’ll still keep that for my “official” homepage.

The main reason I’m switching to Substack (for now— who knows how long this will last) is the community and connections possible. Back in the old old days, bloggers had “blogrolls,” links to other bloggers. Back in the not as old days, I used Feedly and other RSS Feed readers to follow different blogs. Most of those writers stopped posting a while ago, which I suppose is inevitable.

But Substack (this is for anyone who is just reading this and not actually interacting with it on the platform itself) strikes me as an opportunity to reconnect with that kind of community again. The interface is much more like Facebook or Instagram in that there’s a “feed” of both Substackers (what do you call these people?) I follow and about things I’m interested in. You can share or “restack” posts from others in your feed, also like the old days of blogging and social media now. I like that.

Writing on Substack or blogging on my own WordPress site is still mostly screaming into the void. At least 90% of the 2,600+ posts I wrote on my blog have never been read by anyone but me. But besides the fact that the value of writing like this is as much about the process as it is about reaching an audience, every once in a while, I’ll write something that makes that connection with readers. That’s what I’m hoping for here.

Anyway, thanks for coming by, and as be sure to smash that subscribe button (or whatever it is they say nowadays).

Last year was, in a lot of ways, A LOT. I was originally going to make this just a post about only “life” stuff, but I decided to make some mentions to work stuff/AI stuff too. And it is one of those posts no one other than me is going to probably read, but whatever.

Okay, let’s see:

The AI stuff for me actually began in late 2022 when I was teaching a class where I included an AI assignment and I wrote a blog post called “AI Can Save Writing by Killing ‘The College Essay.'” That post got (what is for me) a lot of hits, over 4,000 since this time last year. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: the reason why I keep blogging (at least once in a while) is that when a blog post hits like this, it gets my writing into circulation with an interested audience better than anything I do. Real scholarly publications don’t even come close.  Most of my blog posts remain mostly unread– and most of the scholarly things I’ve published or presented are in the same boat. But every once in a while, one hits like this one.

I didn’t blog at all in January– though I posted a lot of links to stuff I had been reading about AI– and I was busy getting what were three different courses prepped and running. I taught our MA research methods class using Johnny Saldaña’s The Coding Manual for Qualitative Researchers as the main text, in part because at this stage, I was also still trying to figure out how to code and analyze the hundreds of pages of transcripts from faculty interviews about their experiences teaching online during Covid. I think the book was overkill for both my students and my purposes as a researcher, to be honest. I taught a 300-level research writing course that where I decided to use Try This: Research Methods for Writers by Jennifer Clary-Lemon, Derek Mueller, and Kate Pantelidies. It’s an interesting textbook which focuses mostly on primary research (rather than secondary– aka, look stuff up in the library and online). I thought that class was so-so as well, not because of the book (which I would definitely use again, and I hope I get the chance to teach this class again, maybe next year) but because of some of the things I did or didn’t do in the class.

And for my section of first year writing, I did something I haven’t done since I was an MFA student: I actually assigned a book, a real (not a text) book for students to read. I have no objections to the program textbook; I just wanted to try something I haven’t done in a long long time. I had students read Johann Hari’s Stolen Focus: Why You Can’t Pay Attention– and How to Think Deeply Again, and I also assigned parts of my own textbook and a number of essays from Writing Spaces. I wrote a bit about this as a part of this post from last May; basically, students did their research projects about something that Hari talked about in his book. It’s the kind of thing I can get away with after teaching this for most of my life and I don’t need to rely on the textbook, if that makes sense. I did the same thing for my section of first year writing this past fall, and I’m planning on doing it again (times three, and probably for the last time) this coming term. Setting aside the specifics of Hari’s book, I do think there is something to be said for assigning a mainstream non-fiction trade book like this. It sets the theme of the research students will be doing (I never allow students to do research about whatever they want for a ton of different reasons), and it also provides an example of how to use a variety of different kinds of research to make an argument. More on a lot of this later, I’m sure.

Nothing too exciting that I can remember about last January or most of February– just weather, snow and ice respectively. The end of February/beginning of March though was a lot more interesting with our trip to Los Angeles. I think both Annette and I were kind of prepared to not like it much, but I got to say we had a really good time. Yeah, it’s a lot of driving around and WAY too expensive, but I get why people want to live out there. Highlights included the TMZ tour, watching a taping of Jeopardy!, and a couple nights at The Comedy Store (it wasn’t part of the plan, but we stayed at a hotel across the street– lots of fun). Not so much a highlight was an extra day and a half trapped at a hotel by LAX because of bad weather in Detroit.

We had a fun birthday/birthmonth for me dinner at Freya in Detroit in late March, the semester wrapped up, and I had the chance to talk to folks at Hope College about AI stuff in late April. As I blogged about then, that’s a prime example as to why I still blog: someone at Hope read that blog post I wrote back in December 2023, liked it, and invited me to do a talk, which was pretty cool. They would have done it over Zoom, but I actually wanted to make a little trip out of it; Annette came along and we did a little Holland tourism including taking a picture of a windmill.

May brought a good crop of asparagus, and June was the beginning of a fair amount of travel for both of us. We went “up north,” as they say, at a rental on Big Glen Lake. Did some hiking around, ate some fancy food, and saw a good friend rocking out– a pretty typical stay for us up there.  We came home after a week, and a few days later, Annette went out to a conference in Seattle. A couple days after she got back I went to the Computers and Writing Conference at UC Davis– a good conference, I thought. And then, about a week after that, Annette and I went on a Gate 1 tour that went from Dubrovnik, Montenegro, Split, Piltvice Lakes National Park, a bit of Opatija, the Postojna Caves, the super pretty tourist town Bled (which featured some silly dancing on the second night), the capitol of Slovenia, Ljubljana, a brief but nice stop in Trieste, and then Venice: one day with Gate 1 and two more on our own. It was a great trip–though super-busy, and super hot: quite literally, our trip through southern Europe corresponded with the hottest weather ever recorded on Earth– at least up until that point.

Oh yeah, we came home with Covid, too! I am positive we caught it while actually on the tour bus. There was a couple we chatted with a couple times and such who were both feeling like shit– a bad cold, maybe a flu, they thought– but I know I was sick before I got on the plane for back home. I think Annette was too, but it hit her a little later. We were (and are again! just got a booster back in October or so) all vaxxed up, so I like to think that helped it all be not that big of a deal. Actually, I know many MANY more people who had Covid this last year than I did during the worst of the pandemic.

More summer came, we had visits from both my parents and Annette’s, I made a somewhat impromptu road trip to Iowa in late August to get together with “the originals”– that is, just my parents and sisters without all the spouses and kids, and then the school year started up. As I blogged about in September, this is the first time I can remember since entering my PhD program that I did not have some kind of “scholarly project” cooking up in one stage or another. I’m not really working on anything right now (though I did have a couple of different things come out last year, in addition to my talk at CWCON). The break has been good, though I have a feeling I’m going start doing at least a bit more research/scholarship about teaching with AI this coming year.

I got a chance to give another AI and teaching talk (or lead a discussion/workshop, depending on what you want to call it), this time via Zoom and as part of a faculty development event at Washtenaw Community College. I blogged about that too, and my sense from this event was that most faculty have figured out how to deal with AI. Funny what a difference a year makes with this.

Also for the first time ever, EMU had a “Fall Break” in October. A lot of universities have started doing this actually, I think as a result of a lot more attention on college campuses post-covid in helping students with a little “self-care.” So we went to New York, met up with Will, hung around with our old friend Annette Saddik, saw Sweeney Todd, met up with Troy and Lisa, and generally spent way too much money on fun things.

Oh yeah, in October, we put down money on a new house– a brand-new house that’s being built right now in a subdivision in Pittsfield Township sort of between where we are now and Saline. On the one hand, this might look like a surprising turn of events. We had talked about moving before and also about moving into a condo or something for a while.  But a couple years ago, I would have never guessed we would be building a new house that pretty much looks like all the other new houses in new a suburban development (it was a cornfield two years ago) kind of on the outskirts of things. On the other hand, once we started really thinking about it, this started making sense. We like our house and neighborhood A LOT, but there’s a number of things (mostly minor) that need to be fixed or upgraded around here, and there are other things we want (like a bigger kitchen and a more “open concept” living room/dining room area) that we can’t do here. And say what you want about a cookie-cutter house, this place has the layout and the newness we want. Plus the way the housing market is around here nowadays, there just isn’t much on the market. So new house it is. Stay tuned on that one.

Anyway, one of the things we’re really going to miss around here when we move, for sure, including Halloween— not expecting any trick or treaters in the new sub.  Once again, my side of the family did a combined Thanksgiving/Christmas thing (which did include some cookie decorating), and of course a lot of family fun stuff. The semester wrapped, the school year ended, and (more or less), here we are.

Like I said a lot.

There are two different but related stories about higher ed and Covid-19 right now, both of which speak to the stark differences within the hierarchy of universities and online teaching. And spoiler alert: students and faculty elite universities do not like online courses one little bit.

I think this article sums it up for the lawsuits being filed by some students against their universities: From ABC News, “College students clamor for tuition refunds after coronavirus shutters campuses.” The complaints basically boil down to two things: demanding refunds for fees paid on things students can no longer use (dorms, meal plans, lab fees, etc.); demanding their money back for tuition for classes that were forced to go online. It is worth noting these are class action lawsuits being ginned up by some law firms who appear to specialize in these kinds of class action things.

Then there are the calls from university presidents to get back to campus. There was Purdue President Mitch Daniel’s plans for getting Purdue back on campus in the fall, which (as reported in USA Today here) includes a vague goal of separating folks based on age, with the goal of “keeping the university’s younger population separate from older demographic groups that are more at risk from the virus. ‘Literally, our students pose a far greater danger to others than the virus poses to them,’ he wrote.” Also this weekend is an op-ed in the New York Times “College Campuses Must Reopen in the Fall. Here’s How We Do It,” by Christina Paxson. Paxson is the President of Brown University and an economist by training. Among other things, she wrote:

As amazing as videoconferencing technology has become, students face financial, practical and psychological barriers as they try to learn remotely. This is especially true for lower-income students who may not have reliable internet access or private spaces in which to study. If they can’t come back to campus, some students may choose — or be forced by circumstances — to forgo starting college or delay completing their degrees.

First off, I think students certainly ought to get a refund for housing, meal plans, lab fees, and all of those things– and I think most universities are doing something like that. But with tuition, we start to get into a more murky territory.

Granted, a class that shifted into the online lifeboat to finish the term is not the same as it would have been if it had stayed face to face all year. But if the goal was to complete the courses and thus grant students credit for their course work so they could continue to make progress on their degrees or to graduate, there weren’t a lot of other alternatives. In fact, it seems to me a very fair response from universities to these lawsuits would be something along the lines of “Here’s a refund for your tuition, but you aren’t going to get any credit for those courses.” Somehow I don’t think that’s what these students and their lawyers have in mind.

As far as Daniels and Paxson go: I think everyone is hoping that universities open in the fall, though as I’ve heard repeatedly from various talking head experts on cable news, the virus is driving the timeline and no one knows what the conditions will be in September. If we’re still in a world where we’re supposed to stay 6 feet apart, wear masks, and generally distance ourselves from each other, then the re-opening is going to be partial at best. And the idea that we can separate younger students from older faculty (will faculty be teaching behind a plexiglass barrier? will they be zooming in to classrooms filled with students?) is kind of goofy.

But I think these complaints and plans really highlight three long-standing realities in higher education in this country right now.

First, students/faculty/presidents/etc. at elite universities have very different assumptions about what “the college experience” means, at least compared to the rest of us. For elite universities and/or colleges and universities that cater to upper-middle-class and above 18-22 year olds, taking classes is just not what it’s all about. Don’t get me wrong, the quality of academics at elite institutions is extremely high and that’s still the main reason why these students attend these schools. But it’s also a whole lifestyle of dorms or near campus apartments, sporting events, frats and sororities and clubs, parties, beautiful buildings and campuses, etc.

We have all of those things at EMU too, and for a lot of the students we have in that 18-22 year old demographic, those things are important. But most of our students come from the sort of backgrounds where they do not assume all these things are that necessary, at least not compared to the students at the University of Michigan just across town. Frankly, a lot of our students are a lot more involved in the campus life in Ann Arbor than they are at EMU.

Most of my students– some of the 18-22 year olds, almost all of the older students– don’t have time for these extras because they are working. And I don’t mean “working” the way a lot of the students at UM work, with a part-time job to make some beer money and maybe help out with the expenses mostly being covered by the parents. No, I mean working to pay for living: rent, cars, mortgages, kids, etc.

Look, I get it. I was exactly like these elite university students when I was in college at the University of Iowa, and my wife was more or less a student like this at Virginia Tech. Our son was one of these students at the University of Michigan. If online classes were a thing in my day, I might have taken one– and I did actually take a correspondence course to earn enough credits to graduate, a story I tell in my book More Than a Moment.  For all of us, our undergraduate days were important life-shaping times because of the whole “college life” experience. But this is not the only way to go to college, and to suggest otherwise is a good example of unchecked or unnoticed privilege.

This leads to my second point: elite universities don’t like online classes because they are not the college experience (see above) and they still believe online classes are for poor people. That quote from Paxson is disingenuous because she must certainly know the students most likely to take online courses are indeed lower-income students. Why? Because students with less money and more grown-up obligations come to places like EMU, or they attend a completely online university, maybe even one of the mega-universities (Southern New Hampshire, for example) that have been doing high quality online education for years and years.

And online education works. We’ve done research on this for years. In general, the data suggests any college course which a) is routinely taught in a large lecture hall format or taught as a small (less than 40, but ideally about 20) group discussion; b) is primarily based on reading, discussion, writing, quizzes, and tests, and c) does not involve any special equipment (e.g., a chemistry lab, a kiln, a potter’s wheel, a welding torch, etc.) or that requires hands-on practice (e.g., medical procedures, cosmetology or barbering, engine repair, etc.) can be taught online just as effectively as it can be taught face to face. I do realize there are a lot of important college courses that fall into the “c” category of things and can’t be offered exclusively online. I do not think I’d be comfortable undergoing surgery by a physician who trained exclusively online. But thought-out and carefully planned online courses work in the majority of subjects and college classrooms.

Plus most college students– certainly those who attend community colleges and regional universities like EMU– have been taking classes online for a long time. Roughly speaking, almost a third of U.S. college students have taken at least one online course. About 15-20% of college students are taking courses exclusively online, and these online courses and programs are no longer just the products of sketchy for-profits.

But the perception is still there, particularly among the elites, that online courses are for “not real” and/or for poor people. It reminds me a bit of what was going in in the realm of MOOCs a few years ago: all these elite universities were developing these MOOCs they were hoping to somehow monetize by getting students to pay for credit to transfer to another college. But these same institutions were very clear that they would not accept MOOC credit for their students: that is, the University of Michigan is completely fine with students from say EMU paying for their MOOCs and then having that class count as transfer credit, but there was no way UM was going to accept MOOC credit, even when the MOOC was developed and taught by the same faculty teaching the face to face version of the UM course.

Last but not least, Higher Education is going to need a bigger bail-out and some kind of government intervention to change the funding model. This is an issue I am certain Daniels, Paxson, and (at least some of the) students suing would probably agree about. Costs in higher education have been driven up for decades for lots of reasons, but what that means now is so-called public universities have the same business model as private universities. EMU is in the same boat as Brown because most of our revenue comes from tuition, and, as Paxson put it, the loss in tuition revenue this fall, “…only a part of which might be recouped through online courses, would be catastrophic, especially for the many institutions that were in precarious financial positions before the pandemic. It’s not a question of whether institutions will be forced to permanently close, it’s how many.”

And in the medium to long term, I think we need to get to a place where public universities receive most of their funding from the government, and we need to really get over the idea that higher education is defined by the “college experience” of the elites and flagships. The feds and the states (and ultimately tax payers) are going to have to step up and fund higher education so that tuition can be reduced.

But more funding from government will (and should) come with restrictions on how that money is spent, and a lot of the money we waste in higher education in this country– sports, luxurious dorms and recreation facilities, and so forth– are what the elites and flagships out there see as part of the college experience. And that is a problem for the Browns and Purdues of the world: why would a student pay whatever it costs to go to Brown to take online classes (even temporarily) if that student could take a similar online class from a regional university or community college for significantly less money?

I’m preparing syllabi for the fall term (we don’t start until after Labor Day, happily), and I’m mulling over including the section after the break, “What do grades mean?” This isn’t coming from any specific exigence– not even my less than great course evaluations– so much as it is coming from what I guess I feel like an increasing need on my part to be as transparent as possible to my students about various things.

Most of this text is based on stuff I have sometimes included on syllabi for first year writing, the place where I’ve seen the greatest discrepancy between what does and doesn’t constitute a certain grade. I think a lot of this text is plagiarised borrowed from several other places. And I should point out that I’m not convinced that including this language will make a whole lot of difference in terms of students complaining (or not) about their grades. But it’s a try.

Continue reading “Here’s what I think grades mean; what do you think?”

A break from all the MOOC posting (though I have a brief another one of those in me I might get to yet today) to share a Flickr set and an update on the gardening for 2013. Part of what prompted me to post this  is this article I came across via the book of face, “Reclaiming the front yard with edible estates” from the public radio show The Splendid Table.   Basically, it’s a little story about a gardening/art project for turning front yards into food gardens. There are even plans for one garden that features an earthen bread/pizza oven. Hmm, maybe next year….

Anyway, a couple of quick observations:

First, it all continues to be a huge hit with neighbors. When I’m out there doing stuff, people walking by routinely stop to chat, to say how much they like what we’ve done, etc. A few other people in the neighborhood have even given the front yard veggie garden a go for themselves. So it’s all very very good.

Second, it grows quick.  Here’s a picture of the flower/perennial part from last year:

Things were just getting established. Here’s the same view from almost exactly a year later:

Pretty jungle-like now.

Third, it seems we’ve had a fair amount of “wildlife” this year. I tried to plant some beets and cauliflower as a “second crop” in part of the veggies but I think the rabbits got to it, unfortunately. But we have more pleasant critters too, like big fat bees and this particular butterfly, which I seem to see out there all the time:

Oddly, it could be a little warmer and drier this August, but it looks like we have a lot of tomatoes coming at us in a couple weeks.

A couple of Fridays ago (I originally started writing this post about a week and a half ago), I went to the reading group that my colleague Derek Mueller is sponsoring/hosting right now. It’s been a good bit of outreach with small but enthusiastic groups of grad students and faculty, often faculty from other programs in my department. This last time, we talked about Derrida’s “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences.”  I can’t pretend to say that I completely grasp what Derrida was talking about in this essay, but in the nutshell, it’s one of the essays in the early Derrida that signals the beginning of poststructualism.  Among many other things, Derrida is talking about the paradox of “the center” being both within the structure and outside of it, the problem of finding language to describe this condition, and that all thinkers are borrowers (“bricoleurs”) in how we put ideas together.  It’s early writing/thinking that speaks in part to deconstruction.

These reading group gatherings have been interesting discussions in part because faculty from other programs often don’t quite get why people in composition and rhetoric would be interested in things like poststructualist theory or object-oriented ontology or what-have-you. Part of what we talked about during this talk was essentially how poststructualism has influenced things like post-process theory, writing as an “assembly” process, etc., etc. But one of the things that occur to me as I think about all this in relation to the E-Learning and Digital Cultures MOOC.  Because it seems to me that part of the problem here is these folks are trying to disrupt educational structure while being within it, we’re at a loss to find language that describes what this is (a “course?” a “meeting?” a chance to interact?), and both of these in turn raises problems and questions about just what it is we’re doing here. Other than clearly composing an elaborate bricolage.

Week 2 built off of the dystopia of week 1 with the them of “looking to the future,” only the future is still looking kind of dystopian to me. As someone pointed out (I think one of the instructors), dystopia makes for much better stories than utopia, and that certainly is true in the videos. For example, both “A Day Made of Glass” and “Productivity Future Vision” might as well be called “cool stuff rich people will get with new technology.” Then there are the other readings, which for me are an example of the problem of the multiple levels of audience/purpose of the course.  On the other end of the complexity spectrum, week 2 included Rebecca Johnston’s “Salvation or destruction: Metaphors of the Internet,” which again plays off of this reductive binary between dystopia and utopia (but does so by a discursive analysis of newspaper editorials),  and the difficult (but interesting) paper by Julian Bleecker, “Why Things Matter: A Manifesto for Networked Objects– Cohabiting with Pigeons, Arphids, and Aibos in the Internet of Things.”

One of the few texts that was specifically about education/pedagogy issues was Gardner Campbell’s “Ecologies of Yearning,” which was the keynote address at Open Ed ’12. I think Alex Reid has a good blog post about this here, so I’ll just point to that. Though I’ll return to Reid’s reading of that talk in a moment.

I guess these selections are okay, but given that this is supposed to be an “introductory” course and one (at least in part) about “E-learning,” I’m again disappointed in what’s here.  As I mentioned, the videos are the kind of thing I might show in a first year writing class because of their simplicity and “red herring”-esque dichotomy.  In other words, this “dystopia v. utopia” thing is an obvious false choice. Interestingly, in the Google Hangout discussion forum with the instructors a couple of weeks ago, one of them said that they were trying to generate exactly that kind of conversation: that is, they knew they were presenting a false dichotomy and wanted to play off of the conversation generated by that false comparison. The problem is that’s an approach that works with 25 (or 50 or maybe even 200) students but not with 40,000.  Along with these too simple encounters, we’ve also got texts (like Bleecker’s and Campbell’s) that are far beyond an introductory level course. Bleecker is giving my MA students a lot of fits, frankly.  I suppose the goal of these various different levels of reading is to encourage different levels of interaction, but to me the effect is just to confuse the focus of the course.

And there is still very little presence from the instructors/professors/organizers.  Clearly, this has been a conscious and careful choice: they are trying to disrupt the teacher-centered, “sage on the stage” model of a lecturing talking head delivering knowledge via a video. Instead, what we have here is a collection of readings, some basic framing guidelines for discussion, a final assignment (more on that will be coming in the next week or so), and a space for the discussion forums, which are of course quite a mixed bag. The instruction team has done a couple of Google Hangout live forums where they talk about things having to do with the previous week, but other than that, they are not really “there” a lot.

Interestingly enough, one of the better discussion threads is in the general discussion area and it’s called “Where are the professors?” (I presume the only way to see that is to actually be in the class, but if you’re curious, there’s nothing wrong with registering for free and then going to have a look). The topic of the role of the professor in a MOOC is being debated and a couple of the instructors– Christine Sinclair and Sian Bayne– are pretty clear in responding that they are attempting to avoid the “guru professor” mode and are purposefully trying to present themselves as being more of a “connective MOOC” rather than the so-called “xMOOC” which is the commercial model of Coursera.

An admirable experiment. But from my point of view, there are at least two problems here.

First, the connective/knowledge generating MOOC strikes me as an awkward fit within the Coursera framework, especially since I am certain most people who signed up for this class were expecting something with a bit more leadership and focus. I know that’s what I was expecting/assuming when I built participating in this MOOC into my graduate course.  If I knew this was just going to be as decentered (and atypical of Coursera MOOCs) as it is, I might have picked a different one for our class to follow.  Second, because of a lack of a “center” here with no professor (or professors) keeping the group on task with some kind of lecture or regular interaction and because of the size of the group, this all seems a lot more like a “learning opportunity” akin to a conference, an emailing list or messaging board, or a call-in radio show. Which is again an example as to why I don’t think teaching scales.

I think this all begs the question: just what is this MOOC, anyway?

Let me quote at length Reid about his reading of Campbell’s talk:

The central double-bind for digital literacy education–whether it is FTF, traditionally online, or open and online–is between the demand to reinvent/be creative and the expectation of meeting traditional standards. Gardner relates a story of one academic who responds to the idea of open online education by saying “it may be learning, but it’s not academics.” If that is true, it’s because academics is tied to certification, and certification is tied to reaching specific, predetermined goals. I don’t think anyone wants to do away with the practice of certification, especially for certain professions. In fact, the badges movement looks to expand the micro-certifications of academics (e.g. the course credit) into extra-institutional learning experiences. My inclination would be that we need to move in the opposite direction, distancing learning from certifying. But I don’t see us doing that, in part because higher education is a research and certifying machine far more that it is a teaching and learning one.

“Listening to World Music” and “Introduction to Genetics and Evolution” and every other Coursera MOOC I had looked at prior to this were designed primarily to fulfill the certification goal. The potential with these certificate/testing-oriented classes is they can provide reliable certification in the sense that students take quantifiable tests that produce predictable and measurable results. The problem with these classes is they don’t seem to be very valid in the sense of being a credible demonstration of knowledge. I am a certified graduate of “Listening to World Music;” so what? Duke University’s “Introduction to Genetics and Evolution” might be good enough for “ACE CREDIT,” but it’s not good enough to be considered valid credit at Duke.

On the other hand, there is something very valid (or at least “authentic-feeling”) about the learning experience possible in a course like E-Learning and Digital Cultures or the various “cMOOCs” that were the open learning/”edupunk”  experiments that predate Coursera et al by several years. I know I have had tremendous learning experiences from similar experiences– conferences, mailing lists, cooking shows, books, and all kinds of other things that are not formally “educational.” Almost everything (beyond the basics) I learned about writing has little to do with a teacher/student relationship and almost everything to do with the experience of writing and being around other writers and readers.  The problem is though there’s no reliable way to measure what someone has or hasn’t learned from these learning opportunities.  As Gardner put it, it might be learning but it isn’t academic.

For me, this is the difference between learning and education.  MOOCs might be great for learning, but not so great for education.

It’s been months since I’ve posted anything here that relates to “life,” so in the spirit of taking a day off from school (mostly), I thought I’d write a bit about the story of our front yard garden.

Annette and Will and I live in the Ypsilanti neighborhood of Normal Park, which is mostly older homes (ours was built in the late 1940s) with lots and lots of trees. Like lots of people in this neighborhood, we do a fair amount of gardening. I wouldn’t describe us as passionate or knowledgeable (I always admire people who know the names of all of their plants, especially when they know them in Latin), and I don’t think we’re going to win any prizes or be on a garden tour any time soon.  But we do pretty good, I think.  When it comes to flowers and the like, we tend toward hard to kill perennials, pretty standard annuals, a lot of hostas, and hanging baskets that always dry up and die by early August. Herbs grow like weeds, so almost all of them work. We’re not trying to live off the land or anything, so for the most part, food-wise we like the kinds of vegetables that are always best super-fresh, things like lettuce and especially tomatoes. We stick things in the ground, try to remember to water them, hope for the best.

A couple years ago, I heard about and then bought a book by Mel Bartholomew and his “square foot gardening” methods.  My first efforts were back in 2009 along the side of our house in a narrow strip of yard that got a surprising amount of sun.  That worked out well (here are a few more pictures of that).

So in 2010, I decided to tear up an even larger space for I referred to as “the huge square-foot garden” because it was four 4X8 foot raised beds of mostly perennials and herbs. I had pretty good luck with things in 2010 and 2011, though not as much this year– more on that in a second. But this way in the backyard garden has its limitations because it is largely shaded by the giant trees around there– you can see some of them in the background of the photo to the right.

But in 2011, we had a pretty bad year with the side of the house square foot garden, partly because of weather and partly because my neighbor’s tree really shot up and put this once sunny all day long spot into a lot of shade. We missed the tomatoes.

Anyway, that’s what started this year’s front yard garden.

We started with a box built from three twelve-foot long 2X12s, one cut into four three-foot lengths (I had them cut at Home Depot).  Will and I nailed those things together, laid it on top of some gardening fabric, and filled it mostly with “Mel’s Mix” (1/3 vermiculite, 1/3 peat moss, 1/3 compost), though I also added a lot of garden store variety top soil and compost to fill this thing up. The 2X12 box is unnecessarily large and takes a lot of dirt; on the other hand, my smaller boxes are starting to warp a bit, and this thing seems pretty indestructible.

Then I tore up much of the rest of that part of the front yard and ordered several yards/a half-truck full of compost/topsoil.  As the video suggests, there was no going back after this.

It started off looking pretty pathetic back in April:

But we’ve seen pretty steady progress over the summer, and by early September, things were looking pretty good:

We didn’t do this as a political statement about urban farming or our rights as homeowners to plant vegetables in our front yard. We just wanted a sunny spot to grow tomatoes and things. But I remember mentioning these plans to my mother and she thought it might be “tacky,” and there have been some cases (including in a northern Detroit suburb) where it is against code or neighborhood agreements and such.  If you do a search for “front yard gardening,” you’ll come across as many “is this illegal?” web sites as you will pages with tips.

I didn’t think it would be a problem in our neighborhood because there are lots of gardeners around here, but I have to say I’ve been kind of surprised by the enthusiastic and nothing but positive response we’ve heard from people. Whenever Annette or I are out there weeding or picking things, people walking down the street stop and inevitably say something nice about it all. I think it’s fair to say I’ve talked to more of my neighbors in the last five or so months than I did in the previous 10 years.

And we’ve gotten a shitload of tomatoes.

A few tips and/or thoughts for next year:

• One of the reasons why this has worked out so well is because I bought a cheap timer for the sprinkler, which I ran for 30 minutes a day, especially when it was super-hot and dry around here. The simple success of that was a real eye-opener for me, and I’m planning on doing more of that with some of the other garden spaces around here next year.
• The tomatoes did great, though I am thinking that next year, I’ll try planting heirlooms and more unusual tomatoes instead of the more “garden variety” (pun intended) varieties. Carrots were a real surprise— we never had this kind of success with them before– so there will be more of those, and since the basil did crappy in the the backyard this year, I’ll try some more fo that up front next summer.
• I’d like to rehabilitate the side yard garden again, maybe with some combination of perennials and veggies that don’t require quite as much sun. We’ll see.
• And growing isn’t over yet, I don’t think. I need to figure out how late I can still plant stuff like spinach out there.