Category: Uncategorized

Well, at least online….

See this link “The NY Times wants less links” from megnut.com. (BTW, this is the blog of Meg Hourihan, who apparently was one of the people behind the company that started up blogger way back when). Essentially, The New York Times seems to be moving to an online subscription system, similar to what (apparently) The Wall Street Journal started doing earlier this year. As the megnut has it, “…increased traffic would drive increased revenue in the form of online advertising. And in the long term, I believe it would generate more income than charging US$49.95 for an annual subscription.”

Maybe. But I have to say that I am somewhat reminded of the tech.com bubble-burst. Back in those days, people thought that the idea of making “real money” was a sort of thing of the past, that the only “capital” you really needed to run a business was connections and links and such. Maybe it turns out that the NYT people have calculated that when it comes to the web side of their business, they’d make a bunch of money with subscriptions. And they’d still be able to sell ads.

I just remember the old days with The New York Times. When I was in college nearly 20 years ago now at the University of Iowa, you couldn’t get it on the same day; even the Sunday version of the NYT was a few days late. Then there were a number of years there, from about the time I was in my MFA program until I finished my PhD, when I lived in apartments without a washer and dryer. Sundays were laundry day and it quite frequently included a Sunday version of The New York Times. Often with doughnuts.

Nowadays, on those Sundays when I have time (they are rare), I’ll still go get a copy of The New York Times, though not usually with the doughnuts anymore. It isn’t the same reading it online. But then again, I have a lot of emotions tied to the paper, actually.

There was an article in yesterday’s Ann Arbor News titled “Blogs connect students but worry adults: Online journals, forums vulnerable to stalkers.” You have to register to read the story, and for folks outside of the area, I’m not sure that it’s worth it.

On the positive side of things, they do quote some folks who say good things about blogging. There’s a quote from a mom who was impressed with the writing and work done by her daughter on her Xanga blog. And then there’s this passage:

But Don Packard, a ninth- and 11th-grade English teacher at Pioneer High School, said online journals encourage students to write on a consistent basis and can stimulate their creativity.

Packard said that blogs and online journals should be used in a way that is positive and productive. He said he eventually would like to use something like a blog for students to comment on each other’s work in his class. “There’s a certain amount of frankness that comes with anonymity at times and it’s a frankness that’s necessary when talking about writing,” he said.

The rest of the piece is fear-mongering.

If someone didn’t know better, here’s what they would get from the rest of this article about”Web logs” (or “blogs”):

• Blogs are something only kids do.
• Blogs have no potential for educational usefulness.
• The writing on blogs is nothing but “family problems and issues with friends,” “innocent, carefree comments, as well as lewd, sexual suggestions,” “personal information, and sometimes insults or threats,” and just plain dangerous, full of smut smut smut of the kind that “could lead to stalking, and a predator could pretend to be someone else of the same age in order to get to know the student.”
• Xanga is the only way to post a blog.
• Xanga blogs can lead to fights.

And so forth. Here’s my favorite alarmist passage:

Karel Graham, an eighth-grade counselor at Tappan, said she just found out about students’ blogs a couple of weeks ago and is concerned about inappropriate content on a lot of them. It also worries her that many blogs have links that allow readers to e-mail the writer.

A bit later:

Graham said she’s also concerned about the effect online communication will have on children’s social skills.

“Kids are not learning to interact socially in a normal way through verbal communication,” she said.

Jeesh. Yes, Ms. Graham, let’s do all we can to prevent student writing from actually being read and responded to by others. Let’s make sure we keep young people from writing things that matter to them. Yes, let’s do everything we can to have “normal” “verbal” “communication,” presumably the way that you remember it before this new fangled internet thing. Back then, kids never talked about sex, there never were any problems, there were no fights, there were no stalkers’ right? And, yes, yes, let’s keep our children disconnected from the rest of the world and isolated within their own limited face-to-face communities. God forbid they make a connection with someone else outside of their immediate school or town; where might that lead?!

I am not completely unsympathetic to some of these educators’ concerns. Clearly, there are a lot of junior high and high school kids who need a little lesson in audience and the reach of the Internet– of course, as I’ve noted here recently in my discussion of the Phantom Professor and other anonymous bloggers, there are plenty of “grown-ups” who seem unaware of audience and identity issues on the ‘net. I don’t know if school is the place for kids to be updating their Xanga journals about who they’ve been hanging out with and what music they’re listening to, but I also know that these are the kinds of things that normal teenagers think and write about all the time. As John Lovas has written on his blog, I don’t think we ought to criminalize writing like this.

Two other quick thoughts: first, I’m beginning to think that blogging is something that is more than a “passing fad” because it is being reported as being so dangerous and exciting and fun for teenagers. As far as I can tell, that puts blogging in the same category as just about every other popular thing ever. Second, isn’t it interesting how these stories about the dangers of blogs keep popping up in things like newspapers, those things that a lot of readers have abandoned in favor of the new electronic mediums like blogs?

Okay, now I’m curious and I might dash off an email to the blog mailing list I’m on after this:

I figured out how to install WordPress (which was easy after I figured out what I was supposed to to with my config file), and I have something running here, http://www.stevendkrause.com/wordpress I have to say, I’m intrigued because there are a lot of neat features. But I am also full of questions. For example:

• Can I use one software install of wordpress to run two different blogs on the same server? How would I do that? Or do I have to have two different versions of wordpress installed? And if I do that, can I have just one of my two databases running both versions of wordpress?
• How’s the spam with wordpress? If it’s anything like the old MT, it’s a non-starter for me….
• Has anyone tried to import all of their blogger entries into a wordpress blog? With success?

I know I have other questions, but this is enough for now. In the meantime, I must say that I am so far finding wordpress to be bizarrely easy. Maybe too easy….

Update (May 18):

I took the plunge on wordpress for my unofficial blog, which is located here. I managed to convert all the blogger posts over to the wordpress format, too. I lost comments, I should go through and categorize things, and not all the links work anymore; other than that, I thought the transition went pretty smoothly, actually. Check it out.

Via Derek at Earth Wide Moth, I came across CMap Tools, which is a cross-platform “idea mapping” software that looks pretty useful. I haven’t messed with it yet, but it looks easy and fun, and it’s cross-platform. Downloads available here. I can see using this stuff in a first year composition sort of course as a prewriting tool, but I’d be most interested in using this in a class where students have to make web sites in order to “map them” ahead of time.

It’s not there now (because I deleted it), but I can no longer say I have never been spammed on my blogger blog. ‘Cause I have. It wasn’t that many messages– only about 10 or so– and it was easy enough for me to get rid of. All of them were messages about the damn Texas hold ’em poker, btw. Anyway, I am worried that this might be the beginning of the end of blogger-hosted blog for me.

As a teaching tool for blogging, I think blogger is the way to go in most cases because it is so fall-off-a-log easy to do, and it doesn’t require me to do any kind of maintainence/server administrative work. But I think I might be soon (this summer, maybe this fall) approaching a crossroads that will help (force?) me to make a different choice. My colleague Linda Adler-Kassner talked/conned me into figuring out how to use drupal as a CMS tool for the first year writing program here at EMU. She was very impressed with how the Council of Writing Program Administrators web site was working (powered by drupal), and I said I wouldn’t mind figuring out drupal for her and the EMU program. So, if I get it to work for her….

And then there’s also the possibility of switching to WordPress, which many folks swear by as being super-easy to install and all the rest. Still, when I tried to install it on my server space, I got some sort of error. I am guessing I can figure out what went wrong (I think it has to do with my previous install of MT), but therein lies the problem with all of these open source/support it yourself solutions: I don’t really want to figure it out because, while I know I can do it, I know what a huge time suck such approaches can be.

Still, it might be soon “worth it” time and energy-wise to figure out how to use this thing. So folks like Charlie and Clancy and others might be hearing questions from me soon.

I’m writing from the Composition in the 21st Century: A Teaching Symposium gathering, which is sponsored by Bedford/St. Martin’s and being held at Michigan State. An interesting and informative event. I thought about writing quite a bit more about all this, but then I realized that Samantha Blackmon, who is sitting at the same table as me (hi, Sam!) has a nice entry about the event right here. So go read that instead.

Annette and I decided to do some gardening today (pictures will follow eventually), so we went out to Block’s Stand and Greenhouse in Romulus (by far, the best deal in the area) to buy a bunch of flowers and such. We got home, and I started to get stuff out of the back of our messy garage, things like bags of dirt we had from last year. When I got to a couple of bags of cedar mulch, I noticed that there was stuff moving around in them. That freaked me out, of course. And then I got even more freaked out when I realized that there must have been about a half-dozen mice living in this bag of mulch.

Personally, this bothered me a great deal, though I can’t explain exactly why. I mean, they’re just mice. Annette thought they were kinda cute and she felt bad that we were destroying their home. Me, I thought they were little vermin who probably carried disease which were dangerous and which might attack at any moment.

Anyway, I took the bags of mulch out to the street, scooped the contents out into a wheelbarrow, and scared the little buggers out into the street and out to the median grassy area in the process. I think there were about 6 or seven of them. It was creepy to watch them snaking around in that bag, the beady-eyed little things.

Ick. It’s not that strange to see mice around here, and we have had mice in the garage before. And at least we haven’t had any significant problems with some of the other “wildlife” in the neighborhood I’ve seen around here, which includes squirrels, raccoons, opossums, and (of course) birds. Oddly, no rabbits. It’s just I have never come across quite this many of them at one time before.

Oh well. It looks like I’ll be cleaning the garage after I get the plants in the garden, and I’ll probably have to set some of those humane mouse traps, too.

There was an article in Inside Higher Ed about the (previously anonymous) Phantom Professor being fired (or, really, not being rehired) at SMU because of some of the stuff she said in her blog. Lots of people have weighed in, including the equally anonymous Bitch PhD.

If the blog was really the reason for the Phantom Prof. to get fired, then I suspect that SMU over-reacted a bit (of course, given what little I’ve read about SMU in the Inside Higher Ed piece and from the Phantom Prof’s blog, it doesn’t seem all that surprising that they reacted this way, either). I certainly want to protect free speech and such, and I do worry about the chilling effect that things like this might have on non-empowered academic types like adjuncts.

But still….

I’m not saying that she should have been fired for her blog writing, and I’m not convinced that it was just her blog writing that got her not rehired. But it doesn’t really surprise me that SMU decided she was not for them.

I’ve written in my blog many times before about how I just don’t get the whole anonymous blogging thing; if you’re curious, see here, here, and here. I perfectly understand the concept of wanting to complain about things, about venting, about even “whistle-blowing.” I just don’t think that the blogosphere, which reaches potentially anyone with an internet connection, is a particularly good place to publish these sorts of writings. Among other things, as is (apparently) the case here with the Phantom Prof, it is entirely possible that your secret identity isn’t so secret after all, and then the reason for creating a secret identity in the first place collapses around you like a house of cards.

The other thing is this: just having briefly read through the Phantom Prof’s blog, there are a couple of things that strike me as having crossed the line. True, her stories about students are “concealed” sort of, but if you look at some of these entries, they don’t strike me as very secretive at all.

Consider this entry about a student she calls Jack. Then there’s this current entry called “Hot Pockets” which is about an attractive male professor in the department. Among other things, the PP writes “Hot Pockets has white teeth and expressive eyes. The girls are wild about him and every semester I’ve heard of this Ashley or that Jennifer having a big crush on the guy. Poor things. They think they have a chance. Bless his heart, Hot Pockets ain’t a playa. He’s a nice guy. He’s married to a gorgeous woman. He dotes on his kids, coaching their teams and spending his weekends with them instead of lurking around the campus like other profs.”

In a repost of an earlier entry titled “Only the lonely,” PP writes about the many profs at her school who come in on the weekend (which, btw, is a sure sign that she’s not talking about EMU, at least not my department). She writes “One prof just sits in his office and reads the Sunday New York Times. Another comes in on weekends and eats cheeseburgers in his office while he watches DVDs of silent films on his computer.”

Now, those are all pretty darn specific. I mean, unless she’s just making this up (which also gets to one of the problems of the genre of anonymous blogs that tell stories like this– they aren’t fiction; or are they?), don’t you think there’s a pretty good chance that Jack, Prof. Hot Pockets, and Dr. Silent Film are all going to recognize themselves or be recognized by other readers?

Personally, I think complaining about students or colleagues in something like an academic blog crosses a line. As I’ve written about before (in relation to others who have been fired for blogging), I just think it’s unprofessional. I save my complaints for family, trusted friends, and personal writings that I don’t expect to be seen by anyone but me. But it seems to me that if you are going to be writing in a very public place to a potentially vast and uncontrollable audience about students and colleagues, you’ve either got to do a much better job of fictionalizing things (“Dr. Silent Film isn’t real; he’s just a character!”), or you have to be a lot more vague with the identifying details.

In the “duh” department, see this Wired News article, “Eat Fat to Lose Fat.” The headline is deciving because what the article really says is eat a balanced diet. To quote:

Scientists found that in mice, old fat stuck around when the liver had no new fat to process. The results are further evidence that extreme diets often aren’t the ticket to a lean body, and a balanced diet is likely important for more reasons than scientists currently understand.

“Extremes of diet are sometimes unwise, because a balanced diet may be critical for providing certain dietary signals that allow you to respond appropriately to stresses, and one of those stresses is eating too much,” said Dr. Clay Semenkovich, a professor of medicine, cell biology and physiology at the University of Washington and co-author of the study.

The good doctor goes on to say that in the short-term, diets like Atkins seem to work; but in the long-term, people are better off eating a balance of foods. It’s worth pointing out though that part of what they found is that super-duper low-fat diets might not be that good for you either because (apparently) you have to have a certain amount of “new fat” in your diet to convince your liver to get rid of “old fat” around your belly, butt, etc.

Of course, we’re told to eat a “balanced diet” as if we all just knew what that was, as if the merry-go-round called the food pyramid was as simple and as constant as pie (which, sadly, is probably not part of a balanced diet).

There was a good piece on NPR Saturday Edition about some of the problems of the SAT writing test. Basically, besides the other links at this site, they did an interview with Les Perelman, who is the director of writing at MIT. You can listen to the various stories from the web site, though there are a couple of things worth noting:

• Perelman studied the word count of the sample essays used by the SAT folk for scoring and the score they were supposed to receive and figured out that there was a direct correlation between the word count of the essay and the score. As the interviewer said, you could weigh the essays and get the same kind of score as you would from a reader.
• Perelman is on the WPA-L mailing list, and he has provided a few more tidbits about the whole interview process. Among other things, he has said that they talked to him for about an hour to get the 3 or 4 minutes of airtime, and that all of his efforts at bringing up the idea of portfolio grading were cut out of the show.

Update to this and the previous post:

Well, well, well: now that USA Today is weighing in on all this, maybe there will be a bit more attention to the problems of the SAT writing test. Maybe….