Category: Uncategorized

Jenny “Stupid Undergrounds” Edbauer recently posted about how she’s turned off the comments feature on her blog because of the volumes of blog spam she was receiving.

I know exactly how she feels. Even with running the fine software MT-Blacklist, I was spending fifteen minutes to an hour a day getting rid of blog spam when I was supporting my blogs with MovableType. With Blogger and Haloscan? 0. Not a single piece of spam on this site in three + months. And just to compare, go look through the archives at my previous official blog– sorry in advance with what you’ll find.

I’m not completely pleased with Blogger because I still have some of the problems I had with it way back in July, but I think this is more a function of the way I have some browsers configured and installed on my computer than it is with blogger, actually. Haloscan cuts off comments too quickly, and I don’t like the “feel” of the Blogger interface as much as MT.

But I do like the lack of spam, and while I do have some cool blog design envy and I keep contemplating a move to WordPress, I think I’ll probably stick to Blogger, at least until I have the time it would take for me to mess with the WordPress install code.

See this study, “Miracle or Menace: Teaching and Learning with Laptop Computers in the Classroom” which is in Educause Quarterly (Vol. 27, No. 3, 2004). Basically, they gave a bunch of students at West Point laptops and found a “statistically significant” increase in learning as the result of the laptops, as measured by tests and surveys of the students. Definitely worth a read; a few thoughts on my run though the piece:

* West Point is of course a highly selective school, the students all live on campus, and I’m going to guess that theft isn’t that big of a deal on campus. On the other hand, EMU is a school full of non-traditional, returning, and/or commuting students, and EMU is a campus where one always needs to keep an eye on their backpacks. Having said that…

*… I wish some administrator at EMU would suggest at least discussion of a laptop program. Sure, there are a ton of problems, but as this article points out in interesting detail, there are a ton of advantages, too. I was in a meeting just the other day where we were talking about the pressing technological needs on campus. It seems to me that if EMU supported some kind of laptop program, then it could spend less time and money on desktop labs and more on wi-fi networking and such.

* One thing they point out in this study is there a direct relationship between a faculty member’s willingness (or lack thereof) for incorporating the laptops into their teaching and the faculty member’s own use or ownership of a laptop. In other words, teachers who had laptops themselves want to teach with laptops. As someone who has had a laptop for his main (and at times only) computer for around 10 years now, this makes perfect sense to me.

* What I like about this study is that it “triangulates” some research methodologies effectively. Some of it is quantitative, some of it is qualitiative, and together, it tells a good story.

… and she’s four. Her name is Marla Olmstead; this painting is called “Bottomfeeder.”

See this New York Times article, and/or her web site.

See this editorial in support of Kerry for president, which is noteworthy because it comes from the newspaper from Crawford, Texas, “The Lone Star Iconclast” (whadda name!) Right at the top of this page there’s an ad for a paperweight with the tagline “Crawford, Texas: Home of George W. Bush.” All yours for $39.95.

I’m glad that the Iconoclast has finally seen the light, and I’ve been happy about the positive buzz that Kerry has been getting post the debate. But I also have to kind of wonder if this Kerry endorsement isn’t a bit of a “publicity stunt,” too. I’m listening to NPR this morning and they’re talking to the editor of the Iconoclast right now.

And I’m still worried if it’s going to make a difference. ABC News had a poll right after the debate that noted that Kerry might have won the debate, but a majority of those polled were still going to vote for Bush.

I hold out some hope because there was still a large number of people who were undecided in this poll, but I’m still bracing myself of four more years of this idiotic government because people are stupid. I mean, what the polls and news seem to suggest is that a good half of the population has something like this going through their heads:

“Yeah, the economy isn’t that good right now and the only thing Bush has done is cut taxes for rich people. I don’t really feel a lot safer now, even with all the stuff that they’ve been doing with this homeland security stuff. Sure, we let Osma Bin Laden go and it turns out that Bush was either wrong or just flat-out lied about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. I mean, we really had to get rid of Saddam right now, even though it turns out there was no connection between him and 9/11 and he wasn’t a direct threat to the US. And yeah, this war in Iraq, which we shouldn’t have gotten into in the first place, is going really bad.

“But I’m still going to vote for the Bush. Hey, stay the course, right?”

In other words, keep doing the same thing and somehow believe it will turn out differently.

People are stupid.

That, pictured above of course, is called a dragon fruit. Will and I were at Whole Foods the other day and it caught his eye. “Daddy, Daddy!” he said, “Let’s get one of those!” The fact that I of course immediately wanted to get one of these things too says something about the differences between the way that Annette and I grocery shop. When she saw it when she came home from work, she asked what the hell it was, and said there’s no way that she would have bought the thing. For Annette, grocery shopping is an errand, a chore; for Will and I, it’s an adventure.

Anyway, we all had a hunk of it for breakfast the other day. This one weighed maybe a half-pound and fit comfortably in the palm of my hand. It had the texture of a kiwi, and tasted like one sort of, but it wasn’t near as sweet as a kiwi. To me, it seemed kind of bland, almost celery-like in flavor, with a hint of fruit flavor and also, oddly enough, a hint of pepper. It was a worthwhile grocery adventure, but I don’t think dragon fruit are going to become a regular in our household.

I’m doing some research this morning on Amazon.com about books having to do with email style and other types of electronic writing. I came across one book, Lisa Smith’s Business E-Mail: How to Make It Professional and Effective, which may or may not be a good book, I don’t know. But let me quote in its entirety the first customer review:

To tell you the truth, I haven’t read this book. But I thought this would be a convenient place to make fun of this guy in my office who sends out these ridiculously over-worded, multi-page e-mails with the delineated paragraphs and varying fonts to communicate an idea that a normal person could convey in less than 20 words. I get about 7 or 8 messages from him every day, giving me a “project status update” or whatever, whenever he hears something from someone, no matter how trivial or how unrelated it is to my role in the project.

I trust Ms Smith has addressed this problem in her book, and I highly recommend the book to anyone who sends out annoying, unnecessary e-mails to their co-workers all day long.

Ms. Smith must be mightily pleased with that…

There are a couple of interesting articles on The Guardian’s web site about blogs right now– or they were there last week, but I’m just finding them now. There’s this article, “Inside the Ivory Tower,” which is about things like this, an academic blog. A couple of the folks I regularly read have already written about this article a bit– here’s Collin’s take on it, and here’s Clancy’s thoughts on it. I agree with both of them, but I’d also like to emphasize the positive in this piece:

Steven Shaviro (www.shaviro.com/Blog), professor of English at Wayne State University, Detroit, says blogs could supplement the peer review system. “Academic writing and publishing depends on peer review. It serves as a filter to weed out slipshod work. But it is also constraining – the norms enforced by peer review, by dissertation advisers, journal editors and so forth, often have a built-in bias against new, experimental work. So I can see blogs as an alternative space for research, not replacing peer review but existing alongside it.”

For (Jill) Walker, blogs make academics more accountable for their theories. “If I write something about people, academically, and publish it online, they’ll find it and talk back in their blogs. I have to deal with that. I can’t stay safely in my ivory tower. And frankly, I don’t want to.”

A couple of thoughts, mostly self-serving, I will admit:

* I think that Shaviro is spot-on here: I don’t think blogs are going to replace peer reviewed publications, but I do think they can work well with them. This is what I tried to do with my recent Kairos article before it was finally published. And personally, I see this blog as a useful teaching tool in that I refer back to my blog to find readings and links for classes (I don’t assign my blog as reading for my students, though I suppose some of my students read this stuff directly). In other words, it’s about more than scholarship.

* Things were pretty exciting around here back in August because I wrote a couple of posts about the value of academic blogging and how I couldn’t understand why someone would post pseduoanonymously. This irritated a lot of pseduoanonymous bloggers, many of who commented on my blog and on their own blogs that take some issue with the idea of an academic blog. See, these two entries: “Hey, I’m popular with (pseudo)anonymous bloggers!” and “More thoughts and questions about pseudonyms and blogs.” See the comments and you’ll see what I mean, I think. I’m not the first person to talk about blogs as academic spaces and how that can (or can’t) be done anonymously, but I’m just happy that a “real” publication out there is at least saying that “credible” and academic blogging is possible.

See Bush Yoga, which uses a the Bush as fighter pilot action figure to take on different poses. Cute.

Guess.

See this entry from All day Permanent Red which discusses a Salon article that describes the demographic differences between Stewart’s show and O’Reilly’s show. It turns out folks watching The Daily Show are more likely to have a college degree, which just makes sense to me.

In an effort to avoid doing what I should be doing, let me write a few things here about “what’s new” around my life:

* We have mice in our garage. Actually, we had mice in the gas grill, which I discovered only after I wheeled the thing out of the garage and opened it up for the first time in at least a month (I’ve been grilling with charcoal lately). There were two of the little buggers scurrying around in there. So I bought a couple of traps today of the “catch and release” variety. We’ll see how those work. If they manage to get the peanut butter without getting caught, then I move on to the “off with their heads” variety of traps.

* I continue to be stuck on the diet at about the same place. It’s not bad, but it’s not good either. I am considering taking the advice of a friend who was on the South Beach diet, which is to go off of it for a couple of weeks and then do a full “restart” of phase 1. We’ll see.

* My “Sims 2” characters had twins for some reason. They are still babies at this point.

* Will continues to make progress with his handwriting and spelling, but we haven’t gotten back to bike riding yet. Maybe after school today.

* Fall is definitely settling in here– leaves turning, temperatures dropping, school rolling strong, etc. Winter can’t be far.