But here’s the thing:  perhaps this is evidence that at the end of there is no such thing as “open learning education,” for two basic reasons.  First, perhaps what we’re getting at is the age-old difference between “learning” and “education.” Here’s a quote from the article (from behind the firewall, btw, which I get access to because of my connection with Eastern Michigan University):

“We have to get away from this whole idea that universities own learning,” says Alec V. Couros, who teaches his own open class as an associate professor of education at Regina, in Saskatchewan. “They own education in some sense. But they don’t own learning.”

Of course.  People can “learn” about all sorts of things without any connection with any sort of institution, and with college classes taking place in the open– in organized ways, as they discuss in the article, or less organized/visible ways, as I’ve been doing with my classes for years– and all the other “stuff” that is out there on the internets, it seems to me that someone self-motivated enough could literally learn damn near anything nowadays.

But if you want an education, something that is tied to some sort of institution, that involves a program of study/curriculum, where you have (in theory) reliable and trained instructors, and– and this is critical– where you get some sort of degree or certification that is recognized by others, if you want these things, it ain’t free.

Now, in some fields, it used to be there was no difference between learning and an education.  Someone can correct me if I’m wrong about this, but I believe that it used to be possible for someone to become a lawyer/member of the bar simply by “reading” the law– that is, literally going to a law library, reading on one’s own, and then taking a test.  But I’m pretty sure that has not been the case in the U.S. for quite a while.  And while someone could sit at home, in libraries, and/or in various online forums and do all the reading required to earn a PhD, I guarantee you that no university in the world– even one promoting “open learning/education”– would hire someone who claimed to have earned their education by participating in “open learning/education.”

Second, open learning isn’t really “free” and isn’t really completely “open” since it depends on “non-free” and “closed” institutions. As far as I know, everyone who has anything to do with the open learning movement is somehow tied to a “real” university.  In other words, the folks who are engaged in open learning/education really couldn’t do it without the financial support, resources, and credibility that comes about from being associated with a distinctly not open, traditional university.

Don’t get me wrong– I think that the idea and theory behind open learning is great, and it’s one of the reasons why I advocate moving classes from behind the firewall of CMS like Blackboard.  Education should be a public experience, and I think these folks– Dave Cormier, Stephen Downes, George Siemens, many many others– are doing great things.  But I also think that open learning is not going to transform education until we get to the point where we don’t think a college degree as a credential for a particular occupation.  And I don’t expect that to happen anytime soon ever.

Anyway, the new school year is still on my mind, and as I have written in the past here and elsewhere, the new school year feels more like “the new year” to me than the actual New Year in January. I tend to measure things more in school years, which I suppose is a given since I’ve been doing this stuff for a while.  Actually, this year I start my 23rd year teaching in college (counting my time as a graduate assistant), which means a) I am about to cross over to a point where I have teaching college classes for more than half my life, and b) I am not at a point where I am old enough to be a parent to all but the “non-traditional” undergraduates and most of my “traditional” graduate students. Insert music here about drag getting older, etc.

This fall, we go into the year in exile while the building my department is normally in is closed for remodeling.  For the next 18-24 months, our offices are in a dorm and our classrooms are all over campus.  I’m hoping to do a CCCCs talk about this dislocation, actually.  Stay tuned for details.

I’m teaching English 328, which I’ve probably taught 50 times by now.  So not much new there from what I’ve done in the recent past, though I had some good experiences/experiments this summer with peer review I will try to repeat, and since this is an online class where there are some collaborative elements, I want to play around more with some things like Skype and Tinychat to do some synchronous discussion.

I’m also teaching English 505, which is a grad course called “Rhetoric of Science and Technology” I’ve now taught twice before, once online and once in person.  It’s a bit of a bear of a class to teach, because it is one of those classes that is (potentially, at least) about everything, and also because this is the rhetorical theory class for students in our professional writing MA program.  Without getting into the wisdom of that, what I’m going to be doing to get students “up to speed” is to this time teach Crowley and Hawhee’s Ancient Rhetorics for Contemporary Students as sort of a “basically, this is what rhetoric meant/means” before we get on to the more contemporary stuff.  We’ll see how it works out.

And last but not least, I’m teaching an Honor’s Section (that has to be capitalized, right?) of first year composition.  I did this years ago, and I think honors students are an interesting lot to work with.  I haven’t completely figured out the syllabus for this yet, and given some of my challenges with the 505 class, I probably won’t figure it out completely until either the term strikes or we go off strike, whichever comes first.  But basically, I’m going to have them watch RiP! A Remix Manifesto early on in the class and requite students to develop research topics around it.  I think it is generally a good idea and it is also something I hope to talk about at the CCCCs in Atlanta.  Once again, stay tuned/we’ll see how this works out.

A lot of potential out there right now, no?

First, there’s this helpful info-graphic, I believe from Newsweek:

Click on it to read it more clearly. Much more after the jump.

I think that the comparison between books and ebooks is fairly accurate and interesting, though it is of course not an “either/or” situation.  At least I don’t think it is.  A couple weeks ago, before Annette and I went to “grown-up camp,” I bought some “fun reading” books.  I bought a couple of “eBook” novels I had heard about on NPR recently, The Thieves of Manhattan and Super Sad True Love Story, both of which I got as Kindle books (for my iPad), and a paperback version of that dragon and tattoo book and a book my parents had recommended, The Devil in the White City. The only iBook I’ve purchased so far is Clay Shirky’s Cognitive Surplus, which is kind of for fun/kind of for work.  The big difference for me between Kindles and iBooks so far is sheer availability:  there’s just a ton more books for sale for the Kindle.

I know there have been lots of critiques about the difference between eReading (and the readers themselves– the Kindle versus the iPad), and I thought this post by Keith Peters at Bit-101 about taking a USB powered microscope to a close-up view of a Kindle, an iPad, and old-fashioned print.  (BTW, while I have no practical use for a USB powered microscope, if someone were to give me one, that would be pretty cool).  It’s interesting I guess, though it mainly just comes closer to confirming what I knew before:  print (as in paper and such) is more “readable” than the electronic ink of the Kindle, which is more readable in some sense than an iPad.  My own experiences with iPad reading so far is that when it comes to eye strain, it’s somewhere between paper and a computer screen, which is to say it is not a big deal to me.  The one exception to that rule is reading in the sun:  taking an iPad to to the beach or by the pool is a waste of time, unless you want to use it to reflect sun back onto you for a more even tan.  But I don’t think I’d want to take a Kindle into these conditions either– all that sand, wind, water, etc.

I really like reading off the iPad for all kinds of different reasons, but print books still have a lot of utility to me and while their numbers might decline in coming years, I think it’s going to be a long time before they are completely irrelevant.  Books are a really good technology:  they are relatively cheap, much more durable than current eReaders, extremely high resolution, don’t require power or instructions to operate, etc., etc.  And print is permanent.  As I have discussed several times before, I’ve personally experienced the unpleasantness of being “disappeared” from an electronic publication, something that is significantly less likely with paper.  A lot more people might have glanced at my dissertation online than in the print version deposited at Bowling Green State, but I also know that the print version is still there.

BTW, NPR had a pretty interesting story kind of about this, “Books Have Many Futures.” And this piece from The Atlantic, “Before the Kindle, Another Reading Revolution,” which is an interview with Andrew Pettegree about his book The Book in the Renaissance. Maybe I’ll try to download that book for the iPad.

Though it might be a problem finding a place to publish or buy good-ol-fashioned books in the not so distant future.  Ann Arbor’s own Borders has been hemorrhaging money for a number of years, and while it was an academic press, Rice University Press has closed down and is giving up on what a lot of people saw as a very viable alternative to traditional print.  Apparently not viable enough.  Still, I think there’s a chance that more of a “print on demand” sort of model will catch on (I’ve heard rumors of such a thing in the computers and writing world coming online one of these days), and as Ray Connolly pointed out in this piece in The Guardian, authors have often gotten a raw deal from publishers and it does make some sense for writers to just put it up online.  Which also isn’t that different from the way people did it in the past, either– wasn’t Leaves of Grass first published by Whitman himself?

Almost done clearing out the browser links, but before I stop, I wanted to point folks to what may be a better alternative to my current choice in annotation for the iPad, which is iAnnotate.  There’s a new app that I have just started to play with that’s pretty cool called Noterize.  Here’s a link to the video. What I haven’t figured out yet is how these different programs’ annotations translate to different platforms.  As far as I can tell from playing with it for just a few minutes, Noterize’s annotations don’t show up on Preview, while iAnnotate’s do.  Even though Noterize has a much more groovy interface and its easier (IMO) to get stuff on and off my iPad with it, the lack of connectivity to a desktop PDF reader might be a deal breaker.  Still, pretty cool.

Anyway, this was all in the back of my mind while listening to the radio on the way to Costco and I was listening to “Here and Now” and they had a story (mp3) about this story in Salon by Justin Elliott, “How the ‘ground zero mosque’ fear mongering began,” and I had a tiny twinge of second thoughts on my project.  Maybe there’s something there there after all.  Elliott has a time-line how this mosque/community center/whatever it is controversy got so out of hand, and how a right-wing conspiracy theorist blogger named Pamela Geller (her blog is called “Altas Shrugs”) started and fueled this whole thing.  Elliott has a time-line and corresponding links to Geller’s blog to make a pretty compelling argument how her blog made this into a story.  Granted, Geller is more “connected” than most bloggers (her bio points to appearances on various news outlets, and she was apparently on Hannity’s radio show, etc.), but I think Elliott makes a pretty compelling argument that this non-story turned into a story in part because of Geller’s persistence and blogging.  Take a look at Atlas Shrugs now and it’s clear that she’s still using this story, or it’s still using her.

The politics here are interesting in a way, but the dynamics of the rhetorical situation are much more interesting to me.  And maybe I ought to not completely close up that book project yet.

So, to get fully caught up, go back and read my early July post; the short version is when I installed the WIRED app upgrade to my iPad in early July, it erased the June issue of the magazine I bought (and had enjoyed) earlier.  Here’s what I wrote to WIRED customer service email address I hunted down on July 5:

Greetings!

My previously purchased June issue of WIRED was erased with your
latest update, which I find rather outrageous, frankly.  Besides being
the opposite of an update (a downdate?), you’ve buried the instructions for what to do about this at the bottom of a web page andnot on the iTunes store.  And further, your instructions for how users like me should update aren’t working for me, perhaps because I always update apps when I’m connected to a computer. I’m not sure.  Either way, this is pretty lame.

In any event, please either refund my $5 for the June issue, or tell
me how I can get back what I paid for and what your downdate took away from my iPad.  My iTunes Store username is actually
steve@stevendkrause.com, but you can email me instructions at this address.

Thank you,

–Steve

Then I received the following very personal response on July 7:

Dear Subscriber:

We are sorry for the inconvenience this has caused.

1. Please verify that you have updated your app to version 1.1

2. Was the June 2010 version of the app removed from your device prior
to your update?

3. When did you purchase the June 2010.

4. What is the Apple ID under which you made your initial purchase?

5. Please respond to this email with a copy of your iTunes receipt for
the June WIRED Magazine App.

Your response will receive our immediate attention.

If you should need further assistance, please be sure to include all
previous e-mail correspondence.

Thank you for your interest in Wired Digital.

Sincerely,

Kari

Fine.  So here’s what I wrote back to “Kari:”

Dear Kari:

Here are my responses:

On Wed, Jul 7, 2010 at 2:06 PM, Wired Digital- <WIRD@cdsfulfillment.com> wrote:
> Dear Subscriber:
>
>
> We are sorry for the inconvenience this has caused.
>
> 1. Please verify that you have updated your app to version 1.1

Yes, 1.1.0

>
> 2. Was the June 2010 version of the app removed from your device prior
> to your update?

Yes, though not from my computer.  I often remove apps from my iPad to make room for others and then put them back.  This is a normal behavior and has never caused me trouble before with any other apps.

>
> 3. When did you purchase the June 2010.

May 28, 2010.

>
> 4. What is the Apple ID under which you made your initial purchase?

steve@stevendkrause.com

>
> 5. Please respond to this email with a copy of your iTunes receipt for
> the June WIRED Magazine App.

Why in the FUCK would you ask me all of these other questions if this is what you want/need?!?!? And given that I can only buy these items through the Apple store, why wouldn’t you already have all of this information?!?!?  Unbelievable.  See attached.

>
> Your response will receive our immediate attention.
>

I am dubious of that.  It took you this long to respond to this issue,
which in my view is one that should have taken about 3 minutes to
solve.

I look forward to either a full refund or a reinstatement of my
previous purchase.

–Steve

And I included a copy of the receipt, which I should point out was not that easy to do since it is not like Apple just sends you a PDF.

Then, a little less than a week later (July 12), I received this from “Kris”:

Dear Subscriber:

We are forwarding your inquiry to the appropriate department for
handling.

If you should need further assistance, please be sure to include all
previous e-mail correspondence.

Thank you for your interest in Wired Digital.

Sincerely,

Kris

Here’s what I wrote back:

Dear Kari or Kris–

Are you serious in what you are suggesting below?!?  Why was I even
dealing with you if you weren’t the appropriate department for
handling this?

I cannot believe the inability of you folks to properly service this,
which leads me to believe that for all those years I have read
through/browsed through WIRED magazine, it turns out they really don’t have any idea what they are doing or what they are talking about.

I look forward to your refund/reestablishment of my June issue, and I intend to spend a great deal of time complaining about your absolutely horrifically bad handling of this situation in as many online forums as possible.

Yours,

–Steve

Though to be fair, I haven’t had time to complain too much about their terrible service until now.

Then on July 13, I received this, once again from my old friend Kari:

Sound familiar?  So I wrote this:

Kari,

I literally had this same correspondence with you last week.

See the attachment “Krause Wired Issue July 7 Correspondance (KMM39889920V25369L0KM).pdf”  You will note that you asked me the same questions and I provided answers as best I could.  The result?  I received an email from you that said someone else had to handle the problem.  And now I am apparently back at square one.

But given that I doubt you are able actually open an attachment and I have gone this far, I will repeat myself.

and after repeating myself, I wrote this:

You know, I don’t really have any interest in Wired Digital at this point.  When I do freelance work, I bill my time at $50 an hour, which means at this stage, I think you people owe me about $200.  But I am not expecting to get that.  What I would like though is my money back on this app and/or the issues of Wired that you took from me.  I don’t think this is unreasonable, and I don’t think it should take you bozos a month to do this.

I look forward to your reply, and I’d really REALLY be impressed if you actually sent me an original/new/personal reply, too.

–Steve

Time passed; in fact, I didn’t hear anything until the end of July.  Then, after asking, I received this on July 30:

Dear Subscriber:

We have received your proof of purchase and are processing a refund for the June 2010 digital issue previously purchased. Please allow time for processing.

You may now re-purchase the June 2010 issue through iTunes.

If you should need further assistance, please be sure to include all previous e-mail correspondence.

Thank you for your interest in Wired Digital.

Sincerely,

Kari

Really.  Really? I wrote back this:

Dear Kari (if that is indeed your real name)–

Your message doesn’t make sense to me.  You have proof that you owe me a refund for the June 2010 issue, and yet you say I can now “re-purchase the June 2010 issue.”  Why would I do that?  I certainly won’t do that until after you refund me.

Also, given that this has taken about a month to get this far, can you give me any sense of how much more time I am supposed to allow for processing?

–Steve

Interestingly enough, they wrote me back almost right away:

Dear Subscriber:

Please allow 3 to 4 weeks to receive your refund check in the mail.

If you should need further assistance, please be sure to include all previous e-mail correspondence.

Thank you for your interest in Wired Digital.

Sincerely,

Kari

Oy.  I wrote back:

Dear Kari–

Let me get this straight:

*  I was able to download the issue that you deleted from my iPad instantly.

*  Apple and WIRED took my money via credit card and electronically instantly.

*  To refund me, you people are going to actually cut a check– one on paper, like what my grandma used to include for me in birthday cards.

*  And, to send said paper check, it will take 3-4 weeks to get it to me, presumably because you are sending it via mule train.

Do I have that about right?

SIncerely,

–Steve

And last but not least, I received this response on August 2, this time from Kris again:

Dear Subscriber:

We are sorry for the inconvenience this has caused, but yes you are correct. You will receive a refund via check in the mail. Please allow three to four weeks for receipt.

If you should need further assistance, please be sure to include all previous e-mail correspondence.

Thank you for your interest in Wired Digital.

Sincerely,

Kris

And that’s been that.  So, to sum up:

• About a month and a half ago, WIRED’s “update” literally uninstalled a copy of their magazine that I had happily paid for and enjoyed.
• I downloaded my purchase and was charged for my purchase nearly instantly.
• I’ve spent over a month of emailing, complaining, and pleading for a refund, spending much MUCH more than five dollars worth of my time.
• Despite the electronic nature of all of these transactions, these people have to cut me a check, presumably from the bank of Nepal or Mongolia or someplace else at the end of the earth.

And they think I’m going to get WIRED again?  I think not.

Oh, and this bullshit that the web is dead?  That’s the last straw for me.

• We stayed at The Homestead, where Annette made a reservation back in May or June in a fit of “Argh! I need a vacation!” It is a huge property of condos, cottages, time-shares, private homes, and a couple small hotels which is part real estate scheme/part resort, a place where many things are named with a pretentious “The” (e.g., “The Homestead,” which includes a few shops and such in “The Village,” an area of rentals called “The Cottages,” and the small hotel where we stayed called “The Inn.”) I was sort of prepared to not like it because it’s too expensive and a lot of the reviews online are mixed at best.  But just about anyplace in this area of northern Michigan “in season” is too expensive, and since we wanted a comfy room with Internet access and close proximity to the beach (maybe 200 yards away from one of the best in Michigan) and a pool, this worked out great.  We had a room with a gas fireplace, a nice sitting area, plenty roomy, and it also included a great patio.  It was quirky though– for example, none of the doors quite opened or closed right.
• This was designed to be a “vacation,” as opposed to a “trip” like the one we took to California and Oregon in June.  Will was away at Camp Lookout just down the road, so the idea was to mostly do nothing– sleeping in, hanging around the beach and the pool and the patio, reading, going out for nice dinners and drinking cocktails.  You know, camp for grown-ups.
• We did go on a hike that was about seven miles long one day along the Bay View trail.  It was quite nice because it was beautiful views and because it gave us a chance to try out our new picnic/wine backpack (we bought at “the store” or whatever it was called at The Homestead– a good deal, too).  But that was the hottest day up there, so not necessarily the best timed trip.
• That night we met with a friend from our PhD program who teaches up at Northwestern Michigan College, John, and his wife and all-around groovy person, Karen.  We also ended up out there with John’s parents, who were visiting, and some local-yokel friends of theirs too.  Low-key up-north fun:  sit around, drink a little wine or beer, light a fire, and wait for the stars to come out.  And we saw lots of stars, including the Milky Way pretty clearly.  It’s nights like that which make me think that the ancient’s belief that the sky was a roof high above the earth was logical under the circumstances.
• But there was work on this trip.  For starters, I was (and am!) still teaching two classes online and Annette, despite her best efforts, just couldn’t stay completely away.  We had ethernet connectivity in the room, but no wifi (note to self:  next time I go on an extended trip like this, bring one of my Airport Express modems).  But there was wifi in the lobby area, which was probably better because we pretty much had the place to ourselves, room to spread out, and a tremendous view.  Older vacationers would look at us scornfully and mumble how we were “wasting” such a pleasant time.  Younger vacationers asked questions about how they too could get good wifi in this place.
• We had a couple of hours of “drama” on Thursday when I thought I had lost my keys to the car, the only set of keys we had.  We turned the room upside down, looked through every stitch of clothing, walked on the beach and searched under chairs by the pool.  I had called a lock guy with the theory that I could get to a valet key in the glove box, though we were dreading that key not being there and having to get towed to Traverse City and spending lots of time and hundreds of dollars to get back on the road.  And then I picked up a bluetooth keyboard that was on the desk area, a keyboard that I am certain that both Annette and I had moved in the course of the last two hours, and there they were.  We both gasped as if I had just pulled off the greatest magic trick of the century.
• We ate well on this trip:  two times at a place at The Homestead called Nonna’s, mainly because it was close, very good, and reasonably priced for this quality of food.  And then the last night we went to a place in Glen Arbor called Blu that was really really good, certainly as good as any really good restaurant I’ve been to just about anywhere.  Don’t tell Will, but that even includes Bouchon.
• We picked up Will on Friday a little early, and then made a stop at Cherry Republic for him (and us too) before getting back on the road.

And then as soon as I got back to town and was running errands, I sensed the end of summer.  The grocery store had fall plants for sale out front.  A pile of end of the term grading awaits.  Fall term will start soon….

So, following a very basic pickling recipe, I tried my hand at a few pickled vegetables. From left to right:

• Green beans (which I really like pickled a lot, and we have an abundance of them around here and/or from the CSA share from Tantré Farms).
• Carrots (this was kind of a last-minute thing– I had an extra jar and some extra brine, so I figured what the hell?  I also added onion and a hot pepper to this mix).
• Green peppers (Annette’s request, based on a recipe from her grandmother).
• Cucumbers (you know, “pickles”).
• Beets (I have high hopes for this one because we have gotten a lot of beets from the farm this year).
• Green peppers and onions (I think…).

Now, I have no idea if any of this is going to turn out and/or if it is not going to kill us when we try to eat it.  That’s why this is “part 1″ of the pickling post.   I’m pretty optimistic, and it was surprisingly easy to do, but I am still up in the air about the extent to which it is “worth it.”  It seems to me that if you’ve got a lot of something that is going to go bad otherwise (beets, for example), then it might be worth it.  We’ll see in a couple weeks.

Having been born into a world where personal computers were not a revolution, but merely existed alongside air conditioning, microwaves and other appliances, there has been (a perhaps misguided) perception that the young are more digitally in-tune with the ways of the Web than others.

That may not be true, as it turns out. A new study coming out of Northwestern University, discovered that college students have a decided lack of Web savvy, especially when it comes to search engines and the ability to determine the credibility of search results. Apparently, the students favor search engine rankings above all other factors. The only thing that matters is that something is the top search result, not that it’s legit.

This study isn’t really so much about the extent to which young people “automatically know” how to use various computer/internet/device tools just by virtue of being “native” to the technology– in other words, “the kids today” just automatically understand texting and facebook and whatever because they are kids and have never known anything different.  Rather, this study is about how young people (the study included just over 1,000 college freshmen, I think) aren’t particularly thoughtful about evaluating the credibility of things they find on the Internet.  These students more often than not just picked the first thing that came up in Google, paying no attention to any citation information (authors, dates, sources, etc.).  It also turns out that students in this study thought less about the reliability of Wikipedia, perhaps because so many high school teachers hammered into these students that “Wikipedia is bad, m-kay?”

And then the comments on the article tell their own story about who is (and isn’t) “digitally literate.”  First, many commentators complain about the study itself as being too small (there was a typo that it was 100 instead of 1000 subjects) and not really to be about what it claims to be about.  Then there were a wave of comments that more or less say “I don’t believe it because I’m digitally literate,” along with a lot of comments that agree with the study’s results.

Well, first off, if you are reading and commenting about anything on ReadWriteWeb, you are not in the “general population” demographic, period.

Second, I suspect if you studied 1,000 (or more) people in the general population without any controls for age, class, education level, etc., etc., you would get similar results:  that is, one thing I always see missing from these studies is the acknowledgment that maybe the basic assumption that the age of users is not as significant as proponents of the “digital native” argument might think.

Third, it is hardly surprising to me (and to anyone else who has ever taught first year writing) that freshman doing research usually settle on the first piece of research they find, regardless of the quality and usefulness of that research.  Google searches and the like make it a lot easier to find that piece of research, but I can tell you as someone who started teaching freshman long before people just “googled it” that doing what can only be described as “lazy research” is not a new phenomenon.

My two thoughts:

First, Copyright law, always complex and mushy and interpretable, is widely misunderstood and/or ignored in academia.  It is by me.  Take eReserves, for example, something I was discussing with a colleague the other day in relation to course packs.  At EMU, eReserves is the library’s “electronic reserve” system that allows someone like me to put various copyright-protected materials “on reserve” in the form of PDFs that students can download for free.   Many institutions have such systems.  The advantage of eReserves for me is I can add and subtract readings whenever, including the middle of the term (that’s just flat-out impossible with a course pack), and “free” is obviously much cheaper than even the most inexpensive course pack.  But as I understand it, it is actually illegal to repeatedly make available for free some copyright-protected text via this system.  In other words, with essays I teach pretty much every term, like Walter Ong’s “Writing is a Technology that Restructures Thought,” I’m supposed to put that into a course pack so that the copyright is cleared and students pay the royalty.  Another example:  as I understand it, if I show a movie in a class, I’m technically supposed to pay the copyright holders of that film some sort of screening fee, unless I’m showing something that the university has already paid some sort of royalty on already.  (I may be very wrong about this one).

The point is this:  I don’t know anyone who treats eReserves this way, I wouldn’t even think of asking for permission to show a movie in a class, and I don’t really care about these potential copyright violations for admittedly mushy and ignorant reasons.  The way I figure it, no one is going to sue me over eReserves or showing a movie in a class or committing any other copyright crime; at worse, they are going to send me a “cease and desist” letter.  Instead of worrying about the legal ramifications of getting various permissions for use of these materials in my classes, I worry about how reading the things I assign might actually “teach” my students something.  Let the lawyers sort out the copyright violations.

Second, I have been thinking lately about jailbreaking my iPhone.  As most 3G users know, the new iPhone 4 operating system slows and/or crashes older phones.  Quite a bit, actually.  Eventually, I’ll get a new phone, though I am not entirely sure when.  On the “early-side,” maybe I’ll try to justify the iPhone 4 as some sort of Christmas present; on the “late-side,” maybe I’ll hold out for whatever is next (iPhone 5? iPhone 4S?), which, according to MacRumors (they say that the average “update” cycle for the iPhone is 218 days), would probably be sometime between about March and May 2011.  So in the meantime, I kind of feel like I have nothing to lose with attempting the various jailbreak options that are out there; heck, it might even help my older phone work “better.”

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Ratings (1=terrible, 5=mind-blowingly great)

Comments

• It’s been a long time since I wrote any restaurant reviews around here.  I don’t completely know why; it’s not as if I stopped going out to eat.  Maybe it’s because I’ve been playing around with Yelp a fair amount lately.  Anyway, Annette and I went out tonight and started talking about reviewing restaurants again, so here I am.
• Basically, it’s a breakfast/lunch/coffee shop sort of place, though they are to 7pm.  I guess I don’t see it as a place for dinner.
• I’ve only been for breakfast for a couple of times, and all I can tell you for sure is that the various versions of French Toast they have are insanely good.  Baked and sweet and nutty (pecans), it’s excellent and it is not a crazy sized portion, either.  Highly recommend.
• Generally, this is a lunch place for me.  I really like the Avocado BLT a lot, but they always have great soup (pretty much changes every day), so I like to get either the half-sandwich and soup or the salad/soup combo.  I’m partial to the Beezy’s salad.  Get an extra plate though– it’ll make eating the salad a lot easier.
• Great coffee– they carry the Intelligentsia Coffee, which I think is fantastic– though I only get coffee (no espresso drinks).  The wifi is okay (Ypsi Free Wireless), but that’s okay (or not?) because it’s not really a good place to work for a long time.  It is kind of a coffee shop, but more a cafe, if that makes sense.
• Oh, parking-wise:  take a look at the map and park behind.