Category: Uncategorized

(I actually posted this message on the tech-rhet mailing list; I figured I’d “reposition” it here, too).

I received an email from an eager future graduate student the other day asking me what books I was going to use for the graduate course I teach regularly here, “Computers and Writing, Theory and Practice.” It’s a course I’ve taught several times before. The last time I taught it was Fall 2004; the web site is at http://krause.emich.edu/eng516 One other thing I’ll mention: despite its title, the course is supposed to have a pedagogical spin to it since it is a required course for our MA in the Teaching of Writing. While this has shifted in recent years, a significant portion of the students in this program are practicing high school or junior high teachers, so I try to include materials that have some K-12 relevance.

Anyway, that future student’s email got me thinking about this and another course, so I thought I’d throw it out there to see what folks think:

• Are there any recommendations for an anthology of current readings on the “state of affairs” in computers and composition studies? I have a lot of pieces in my class from past anthologies and such, but I guess I’m looking to see if there are newer (2003 +) collections that folks like.
• Any single-authored and/or collaboratively written texts out there on the subject that people like? For example, one book I will probably include is Literate Lives in the Information Age: Narratives of Literacy from the United States by Selfe and Hawisher and many “et al” (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2004 ). I just think it’s a really interesting and original collection. I’ve thought about using Gee’s book on video games and Selber’s book about multimedia literacy. Any other ideas?
• Speaking of book ideas: for a different class (“Writing for the World Wide Web”), I’m looking for a sort of CSS for beginners kind of text. If I decide to go that route; I might just use resources on the web to facilitate this. Last year, I used Eric Meyer’s Cascading Style Sheets: The Definitive Guide, Second Edition, which is an excellent book, but complete overkill for this class. So I’m looking for something that isn’t “for dummies” (if you get my drift) but that is focused for relative beginners, too.

Any ideas?

Inside Higher Ed has an analysis of the impact of the merger of WebCT and Blackboard, which is already being dubbed “BlackCT.” Hee… hee… the dark-side of CMS products….

Personally, I have always thought that both Blackboard and WebCT sucked (though I have more experience with WebCT and think that it really sucks), so I am at a loss as to how these two companies are going to be able to “join forces” to make a product that is less than painful. So, the argument goes, the competition is going to be Open Source:

While Blackboard may dwarf all the open source alternatives, two of them — Moodle and Sakai — have strong support, and Sakai is attracting the participation of a number of institutions that are influential in higher education generally and in technology specifically.

That may very well be true, but, as I’ve mentioned before, I’m reasonably happy with the software I’m using for my online class, eCollege. I’d hate to see them go out of business because, knowing EMU, they’d buy into a product like BlackCT.

Regardless of the product I use though, I think the most important aspect of any CMS is local support. Really, this is the best part of eCollege: I email and/or call the local tech guys and they respond within hours or less. With that support, just about anything will work out.

Friend Mary sent me a link to the_velvet_rut, a blog kept by a distant friend of mine from graduate school in Bowling Green who is now working (teaching?) at Tulane University in NOLA. Needless to say, she has a lot of thoughts about Hurricane Katrina right now, though as far as I can tell, she’s in Tennessee right now.

BTW, Tulane won’t be having courses this fall, which probably isn’t too surprising.

I finished As I Lay Dying this afternoon, about two or three weeks behind schedule, at least according to Oprah’s Book Club’s schedule. Right now, I’m supposed to be halfway through The Sound and the Fury, but I don’t see me catching up anytime soon.

I did ultimately enjoy As I Lay Dying and I know I got a lot more out of it than I did when I first read it 20 some-odd years ago. In fact, judging by some of the things that happened that I simply do not remember at all, I wonder if I even managed to finish it way back when.

Still, the whole thing did (and does) feel a little like homework to me, complete with “Oprah’s classroom” and her staff of professor lecturers. (BTW, I did catch part of one of the lectures on The Sound and the Fury, and I like this professor– Thadious M. Davis, who has a fancy position at U of Pennsylvania— better than the last one). And, I don’t know, maybe a lot of the other people in Oprah’s little club are interested in that homework experience. Me, not so much. So since it isn’t likely to be on “the test,” I think I’m going to go ahead and skip it and go on to Light in August.

I have read The Sound and the Fury before, (slightly) more recently than As I Lay Dying and completely on my own.

It was the summer between my junior and senior years in college, when I was a night janitor at the University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics. Other than my current job, this was probably the best gig I ever had– certainly it was my best short-time/summer job. The pay wasn’t great (though I do remember it being more than minimum wage), but I got plenty of hours, from 5 pm to 1 am, Monday through Friday, and, for the young person I was, those hours weren’t even that bad. I’d sleep until 10 or 11, do various things around town, go to work, and go back home where (inevitably) at least one of my housemates was still awake.

Some of the janitor work was kind of grim. Since it was a hospital, there were some areas that were kind of… ah… bloody. But 95% of the work involved cleaning things like bathrooms and offices and waiting rooms, and that work was easy. REALLY easy. I almost always worked alone, and if I worked at a decent pace, I could clean up my assigned area in about four or five hours, leaving me three or four hours to sit around. For me, that meant reading. Just about all of these waiting rooms had great magazines– The New Yorker, Smithsonian, National Geographic, etc.– so I read lot of those things. But I was an English major and aspiring writer after all, so I also read a lot of “literature,” mostly good books. I remember reading a bunch of T.S. Eliot, Hemingway, I think I read most of Flannery O’Connor’s short stories, and, among all this other stuff, I read The Sound and the Fury.

To be honest, I don’t remember a whole lot about the book, and I don’t remember liking it that much. I remember it being a very difficult book for me to grasp, and I also remember someone advising me to keep in mind that the narrator for the first part of the book is retarded (Oprah’s web site refers to Benjy as “mentally challenged,” which strikes me as rather patronizing). Thumbing through it now, I remember that Benjy is watching some people play golf.

Anyway, maybe I’ll come back to The Sound and the Fury another time. The stuff on Oprah’s web site looks interesting and helpful, and it will probably be there for a while. But for now, on with Light in August.

I am not quite sure if today or tomorrow is actually the longest day of the year, but today felt like the longest day to me. Without going into any great detail, today was one of those days where it seemed like I dealt with/experienced about three days worth of stuff. Some of it was good (kudos on my CHE piece, some other good news in the sense that I heard some “not bad” news, I finished grading for my spring term class, etc.), some of it bad (hearing about John, unbelievably bad traffic in town, I had to finish grading for my spring term class, etc.).

Interestingly, one of the things that really frosted my cake (so to speak) today is something I don’t think I should write about in any detail. All I’ll say is this: today, for the first time in 17 years of teaching college, I had a student hand in a final research project/essay that was blatantly plagiarized, meaning just flat-out stolen. I was reading along with this essay, came across a sentence that made me think “wow, that sounds not like a student essay at all,” typed that sentence into Google, and whammo, there was the essay. Or most of it. I felt sorry for and really pissed off at this student all at the same time.

Anyway, the day is finally over, as is the semester. Tomorrow morning, I’m leaving town until about July 10, give or take. I’m bringing my laptop with me, but I have no idea what sort of Internet access I’ll have, and I’m almost certain I won’t have a lot of “official” things to post. I might post some stuff to the unofficial blog if you’re really curious. If not, I’ll see ya in a couple of weeks.

I’ve been kind of stuck diet/exercise-wise for most of this month: I haven’t really gained any weight, but I haven’t lost any either, which is a shame because I had a particular weight goal in mind I wanted to reach by the time we left for our trip out west, a goal I’ll end up missing by 5 or so pounds. Oh well….

In any event, the end of spring teaching is near, and after our various end of June/beginning of July travels, I should be able to kind of ease into a more regular diet and exercise program. Here’s a run-down on some plans and goals:

• Eat right, of course. I know (basically) what this means, though to be perfectly honest, I feel like I do pretty much “eat right” right now. Lotsa veggies, whole grains, lean meats, things like yogurt and high fiber cereal, olive oil instead of “bad fats” when I can, nuts, etc. I think I am pretty close to the sort of recommendations that are associated with the food pyramid or the Harvard eating plan or phase 2 of the South Beach diet, all of which are pretty much the same thing.

  Or let me put it this way: I eat as healthy of a diet as I am willing to eat and still enjoy my life, which includes the joy of good food. There’s always got to be some balance in these things. Julia Childs swore by butter and lived to be 95 or something like that.

• Eat less. For me, I think not doing this has been my problem. I mean, if you eat boneless/skinless chicken breast that’s been grilled with some brocolli and a brown rice pilaf kind of thing but you eat enough of it to count as two adult servings, you’re not going to lose weight, period.
• ASAP, I’m going to cancel my membership at the One-on-One gym in Ann Arbor and sign up for the Washtenaw County Recreation Center. This might not seem like a move in the right direction, but the main goal here is to save cash. The main reason why Annette and I signed up for One-on-One shortly after we moved here was because Annette wanted a place with a schedule for aerobics that worked for her. That’s all fine and good, but everything I do at the gym is things involving machines: weight machines, cardio machines, etc. I am unlikely to start taking exercise classes anytime soon.

  Anyway, after years of not thinking much about it, I realized that really, I don’t need to go to a place as expensive as One-on-One to do what I do. The Washtenaw County Rec Center is $170 a year for me, which is about a third of what it costs for a year for me at One-on-One. So I’m outta there, and given that the rec center has a pool and exercise classes, Annette might be out of One-on-One too.

• You know, exercise more and stuff. While Will’s out of school, Annette and I will have some “day care issues” that will mean a not completely regular schedule for a workout, so the best that I think I will be able to do is get to the gym when I can and find exercise in other ways. But that’s something relatively easy to do in July and August around here: early walks, gardening, etc.

And then, when Will is back in school, I can kick into mucho workout mode. But more on that later.

What I’d like to accomplish by the end of the summer is to get back to the weight I was at when we went to Hawaii last year, about 10 pounds south of right now. I think it’s possible, but I think I’m going to have to do more than be on the “non-diet” diet I have been on.

The scene I saw while walking this morning:

Driving west down Cross, a large red pick-up truck, the driver honking the horn repeatedly. Three people in the cab, all of them waving their arms out the windows. They speed up. They are trying to catch a dark colored station wagon (a Subaru, I believe) in front of them. It appears that there is a purse or some other sort of bag on the roof of the station wagon on the driver’s side.

The scene (I presume) for the people in the red pick-up:

“Catch ‘em, catch ‘em, Earl! That crazy woman left her purse on the roof!�

“That’s gonna be a big mess when it falls….â€?

“Can you imagine leaving it up there? I hope they don’t have a baby.�

“I’ll speed up.�

The scene (I presume) for the people in the station wagon:

“What are those people doing back there?�

“I don’t know, but I sure as heck am not stopping for them. Let’s get outta here!�

Back in the middle of May, I wrote this post, which really was a reference to Derek’s blog about CMaps tools, which is a free idea mapping software. I still haven’t had a chance to monkey around with it, but this morning, I came across this article in the LA Times, “Fla. Concept Mapping Idea Going Global.” They’re talking about using concept maps and this software in applications that aren’t writing courses, but it still sounds pretty interesting:

NASA and the Defense Department paid for most of the research. The military uses concept mapping both as a learning tool and to help unlock information from the minds of scientists for use by future generations, said Alberto Canas, the institute’s associate director and leading Cmap researcher.

“Having a tool that allows the scientist to express that (knowledge) is no different than trying to figure out what little Johnny knows about volcanoes in the fifth grade,” Canas said.

Cmaps can be used to assess student knowledge, encourage thinking and problem solving instead of rote learning, organize information for writing projects and help teachers write new curricula.

The “going global” part comes from the adoption of this software by the Panamanian educational system. As an aside/dig at the way education tends to work in the U.S., Alberto Canas, the institute’s associate director and leading Cmap researcher, pointed out the problem of “just using” this software here: “‘If you’re in Italy and you’re in a school and you like the software, you download it and install it,’ he said. In the United States, teachers typically must go through technology coordinators and other bureaucratic hoops….”

Part of me is still trying to get a hold of the “big deal” here; haven’t people been making “idea maps” with pen and paper for a long time now? On the other hand, these things can be linked to on a web site and can be worked on collaboratively too. So maybe I ought to check this out sooner than later….