Category: Uncategorized

Check out this list of “Essential bookmarks for web designers and web developers.” I don’t really have time right now to see if it really is all that “essential” for the likes of me, but I am more than willing to let this guy maintain this handy list of links instead of me. Or at least I’m willing to link to his list of links….

This morning, I surfed over to Jeff Rice’s blog and read this entry called “Media Mind,” which is a reflection on a New York Times Magazine essay by Steve Johnson called “TV Makes You Smarter.” Here’s a relevant paragraph from that article, one that makes me think it might make for a good reading assignment in the class I teach called “Writing, Style, and Technology:”

But another kind of televised intelligence is on the rise. Think of the cognitive benefits conventionally ascribed to reading: attention, patience, retention, the parsing of narrative threads. Over the last half-century, programming on TV has increased the demands it places on precisely these mental faculties. This growing complexity involves three primary elements: multiple threading, flashing arrows and social networks.

In other words, not all television is crappy, and I think this has always been the case, actually.

Anyway, on my way back from the gym (where, among other things, I walked/jogged on a treadmill while watching TV), I heard this BBC News story on Michigan Public Radio about an organization called White Dot that is claiming this as turn your TV off week. It was the usual “TV is bad for you” story, but with an interesting twist. As the White Dot web site makes clear, this organization wants folks to turn off TVs that are invading public spaces (bars, pubs, cafes, etc.), and they want them to use this universal remote device to do it. To quote from their web site:

At EuroDisney, before they can see “Honey I Shrunk the Kids”, visitors are ushered into a dark, carpeted room to wait for the next show to begin. Stuck there, with nowhere to go, they are forced to watch Kodak commercials on long banks of televisions. Standing in line at Disneyland is now a business all in itself. And these visitors, who’ve already paid their money, are now the perfect captive audience.

Luckily, on the day I was there with my young daughter, I had a prototype of the TV-B-Gone universal TV off switch. Very slowly, I pulled it out of my bag and aimed it up at the nearest television. I pressed the button and my mouth fell open. The entire bank of TVs on my side of the room had gone black.

“Man,” I thought “the future starts now!”

First off, if you go to a place like EuroDisney and are steamed about how you are constantly being bombarded by media messages and commercials, I think the televisions you are forced to watch while waiting in line are the least of your problems.

Second, there are plenty of places to go where you can enjoy a “TV Free” environment in public. I can’t think of a coffee shop that I go to that has a television, and while I go to plenty of restaurants and bars that have TVs, most of those places have areas where you can sit and be pretty much away from TV.

Third, it seems to me that going into a crowded bar and messing with the TV with this TV Be Gone device (during a Pistons playoff game, for example) is a way to get yourself a good ass-whoppin’. And that’s the thing: while these White Dot people see a TV in a bar as an invasion of their precisious personal space, most of the people in the bar are there to be a part of a community experience, one that involves watching a sporting event on TV.

Personally, the whole argument is pretty irrelevant to me right now. I used to watch quite a bit more TV than I do now, but I think I have more or less passed out of the demographic for “ideal” television viewer. Nowadays, I mostly watch the Food Network, Comedy Central, network news, and CNN. I watch stuff on HBO once in a while (Six Feet Under, for example), but I think I can count on one hand the number of network shows I watch on an even remotely regular basis.

Just don’t use that TV Be Gone thing on me….

This is old news (it showed up on Kairosnews a week ago), but check out the CFP for Computers and Writing Online anyway. Proposals are due on May 2, which means this might be a good opportunity for graduate students or even “go-getter” undergrads to participate in a version of an academic conference without having to put up the money (fees, travel, etc.).

One of the other innovations here is that C&W online is going to be hosted via the Kairosnews blog space; another example of how blogs have a lot of potential and promise for the kind of scholarly work we do in person and/or in print now.

Here’s my backyard this morning– ON FREAKIN’ APRIL 24!!! Jeesh.

We’re under a winter storm warning, but I have my doubts. They were predicting up to seven inches yesterday in the paper, and they’ve backed down to maybe three today. We’ll see. And then tomorrow, it’s supposed to get up to 50.

Stupid Michigan weather….

I think this has been up and running for a while, but I am just getting around to adding a link now:

Lessig @ CCCC

They are mp3 files (along with some links) and I think they will be “required listening” the next time I teach 516. The only problem is that a sound recording alone can’t capture all the excitement of Lessig’s presentation; you’d need some video for that, or at least his zillions of PowerPoint slides.

I stumbled across this, the Juicy Studio Readability Test, while surfing around this morning. Plug in an URL and it gives you results, though the page is a little confusing, I think– you have to scan down the page quite a bit. Interestingly enough, my official blog scores a 10.7 on the Gunning Fog Index (which means, according to the explanation on the site, that I’m somewhere between Newsweek and The Wall Street Journal), while my unofficial blog scores a 7.03 (somewhere between TV Guide and Reader’s Digest).

Yeah, yeah, I know, readability tests are problematic, of course. But I still think that they’re kind of interesting, and I think it might be interesting to use some things like readability tests and grammar checkers as part of the revision process– not grading mind you, but as an aid in reading. I know this is the case in my own writing. I have the grammar checker off in my copy of MS Word, but every once in a while, I do run it when I’m revising or proofreading something. I find it frequently helps me slow down my in my own re-reading, and every once in a while, it gives me some good advice.

And besides, this site is just kinda fun.

I went to my doctor today to get some allergy medicine and some other miscellaneous and routine things. I hate going to the doctor for at least two different reasons. First, I’m not all that crazy about this particular doctor– he’s not bad, but I don’t think he’s great, either. One of these days, I’m going to do the legwork to find a doctor who isn’t associated with a megahealth industrial complex sort of operation and who takes my insurance and is someone who seems both competent and likeable. Good luck with that one, huh?

Second, going to the doctor– even when you show up on time, even when it is just to get some stupid allergy medicine– involves an hour wait. Which begs the question: why not just show up an hour late?

Anyway, I had my laptop with me to do some various school work and email activities. I typed away in the waiting room happily. Once I got situated in the exam room, I took out my laptop again and resumed tying. About five minutes later, the nurse knocked at the door and peeked in. “Mr. Krause?”

“Yes?”

“Uh, can you turn off your laptop? It’s interfering with the EKG machine next door.”

“Oh, okay. No problem. I hope it didn’t cause any problems.”

“No, no. The readings were too weird, we knew something was wrong.”

But I’m just picturing the poor sap who was hooked up to the machine. You know that they started the thing up and the nurse said something like “Wow, that’s weird.” Not exactly the words you want to hear from a health care professional while they are running tests….

I was up later than I would have preferred last night so I could finish posting the grades for English 444, Writing for the World Wide Web. This was the third time I’ve taught this class and it was easily the most successful of my efforts to date. I thought this version of the class went as well as it did because of the students. I suppose that’s true for my other classes too, but I have to say this was especially the case with this group. As I was figuring out the grades last night, I realized again that I was darn lucky because I really did have an excellent combination of graduate and undergraduate students, and they were just across the board really diligent and hard-working. When you have students who come into the class already enthusiastic for the subject (and who else would voluntarily sign up for a class called “Writing for the World Wide Web?”), it makes the teacher’s job pretty easy.

Though I thought I did a pretty good job, too.

Things I learned (and will hopefully remember the next time I teach this course):

• For reasons too complicated to explain here, the main project of the class ended up being a collaborative revision of the web site that is supposed to provide information about graduate studies in the EMU English department. I’m not sure if I would do this again or not. For one thing, I’m not sure an opportunity for a “real” collaborative project will drop in my lap again. For another, the assignment took a lot of time and I had to cancel some of the other projects I had planned for the class. On the other hand, I think the sites and reports that groups created for this project were excellent, and the feedback I’ve gotten from students so far suggest they got a lot out of this activity. So I don’t know; we’ll see.
• The Lynch and Horton book Web Style Guide is excellent and I will most certainly use it again. I hope they come out with a new edition. On the other hand, I certainly would not use the Nico Macdonald book What is Web Design? again. I picked it pretty much “blind” as the result of a recommendation from a mailing list. But this turned out to be bad advice; personally, I wouldn’t recommend this book for much of anything.
• As I wrote about way back in December and again a bit in January, I’ve always had a conflict, perhaps just a personal one, between the “technology” part of things and the “writing” part of things with this class. This semester, I put these concerns aside and I assigned Eric Meyer’s book, Cascading Style Sheets: The Definitive Guide. Now, I’m glad I finally really learned more than the basics of CSS and I think the Meyer book is an essential resource for anyone interested in this, but I don’t think I’ll teach this book again. We ended up spending two weeks on the Meyer book, which I think was about a week too much. Next time around, I think I’ll look for more of an introductory book or web resource.

  On the other hand, I think it’s fair to say that knowing some basics about CSS turned out to be very important for everyone, including me. I also think that the order I did this helped a lot. We spent over the first month of class on these sorts of “computer geek” activities: basic and not so basic HTML, file transfer, basic photoshop and image manipulation, and CSS. Once we got a handle on the tools, we moved to issues of design, and this semester has convinced me that this is definitely the way to go. The design issues make a heck of a lot more sense when you know a bit about the tools you’re designing with.

• I probably will have some kind of assignment next time where students will have to individually create style sheets for a common page, something along the lines of the CSS Zen Garden project.
• Next time, I’ll probably have more readings/discussions about blogs and content management systems like drupal, but I don’t think I’ll use a collaborative blog set-up again. Maybe I just need to figure out for myself how to do this correctly, but once again, I really wish I had set up a mailing list for the class; it would made basic communication a lot easier.

Charlie Lowe (with the help of others, he insists) has pieced together a pretty nice web-based bibliography about blogs and teaching. I’ll certainly want to go back and look at this more carefully, but I will say two things for now. First, I made the list ;-) . Second, I wish I would have seen this earlier.

For the record, I am not Steve Krause II, and I never played the part of a crash victim, nor was I in a porn movie. The weird things you find on the ‘net….