Writer, Professor, and Everything Else
This seems about right to me, though I don’t know about the humble part. I like whippets.
I’m slowly but surly reading The Golden Compass right now, the book that is the basis of the movie site linked above, and the site that is the basis of this blog-like space. This sort of fantasy is not usually my reading cup of tea, but it is extremely well-written and interesting. I just hope they don’t screw it up in the movie too badly.
Gosh, there’s so much here that if I keep sorting through it, I’ll never get anything done today:
“Web/Web 2.0 Tools,” from the always great DigitalKoans blog.
This falls into the category of things that will be useful for teaching potentially in the near future:
“CIA, FBI computers used for Wikipedia whitewashing.” Conveniently, this link has links to some other pages on this topic, and those pages have a few other links on Wikipedia security/reliability too.
I don’t know if this is an official or unofficial topic, but I came across it via Johndan’s Work/Space blog and I just thought it was so cool as a former Pynchon geek: “San Jose Semaphore’s message atop Adobe Building is…” Thomas Pynchon’s classic short novel The Crying of Lot 49. This makes me want to go to San Jose.
The new Kairos is out and it features a revised version of an essay/article I wrote originally for CCC Online in 2002, “Where Do I List This on My CV?”Considering the Values of Self-Published Web Sites. The new version here– version 2.0– includes the old version and also some updates.
I had a fine time working with the fine folks at Kairos, especially Mike Edwards and Cheryl Ball. Cheryl asked me a while back if I was interested in this process of revamping the article, and Mike did a great job of leading me through the process. I’m thankful for their advice and help, and I hope that folks out there find this second version interesting and helpful and all the rest.
I’m not even sure how I came across this:
“The Write Kit” (aka 186 Media) on YouTube is a series of short videos that act as creative writing exercises. I watched this one:
Kind of interesting…. I think that these exercises seem more geared toward a secondary school audience, and I’m not crazy that it seems to be structured as kind of a 5 paragraph essay. But it is a cool idea, potentially. I’ve been thinking about doing something similar to this with a series of short lessons on how to make a simple web site, sort of a video version of Krause’s How To HTML.
Just browsing Inside Higher Ed this morning, I read through this article “Surviving the first year” by Shari Dinkins, and by “first year,” she means the first year of a faculty person on the tenure-track. It’s all good advice, though if I had to pick two– okay, three– highlights from the piece, it would be “don’t fall into one camp right away” (meaning be careful how quickly you politically identify with one group or another), “STFU” (meaning that the new person needs to hold their tongues a bit), and “Prepare for a deeper level of commitment” (meaning that there is a big difference between being a full-time adjunct and a tenure-track faculty person– Dinkins describes it as the difference between “just dating” and being engaged).
I suppose that means I’m married to the institution at this point….
Anyway, I’m starting this school year as a newly promoted full professor. As I’ve mentioned here before, that is not as big of a deal as it is at many other schools– certainly tier 1 research schools– because everyone at EMU who manages to get tenure and who continues to have something resembling a pulse gets promoted to professor. That low standard and the general blues/bad budgets hitting EMU makes my promotion and current state a very mixed bag indeed. On the one hand, “it’s good to be the king,” it does mean something to have seniority, and the pay raise is nice. On the other hand, it doesn’t mean as much here since it’s a promotion everyone can be expected to receive, it’s the last pay raise I’m ever likely to receive, and it makes any more mobility to another institution all that more difficult. And given the metaphoric and literal shit that has hit the fan at EMU in the last year (an ugly faculty strike, a meddling board of regents, a murder cover-up followed by a weird media blitz by the ex EMU president, and, most recently, a series of very deep and troubling budget cuts), I’ve been thinking about mobility lately.
The truth is that leaving EMU would be difficult. Besides all kinds of complications being a full professor applying for a less than that level job, I’m part of an academic couple and a commuter marriage is not on the table. And complicating the matter even more is the fact that we live near the epicenter of the collapse of the sub-prime mortgage debacle means that our chances of selling our house and not losing way too much money seems unlikely. Oh, and besides all that: if I were to leave EMU at the end of this year while I am on sabbatical, I’d have to pay EMU half my salary back. That ain’t gonna happen.
So, like I said, it’s a mixed bag. It is nice to feel empowered and secure, but it’s not as nice to feel stuck.
Steve B. and I played golf today at Reddeman Farms, and a good time with good play was had by one and all. I don’t think that Annette was thrilled with playing again this week after playing Sunday, but I still contend that Sunday was last week. And I’m not gonna lie– there were a couple mulligans and a “time traveler” involved– but I still managed to have a 96 on the round, I had six pars, and I didn’t melt down on any hole. Ultimately, I lost to Steve B. by two, but still, a great round for me.
Now, on the back nine, there was a college kid playing behind us by himself. He was walking, so we didn’t hold him up really, but we did get a chance to see him hit some great shots. So we (mostly Steve B., actually) were small-talking with him in the parking lot after the round and I asked him how he did. “69,” he said.
“No shit?!” I said.
“Well, I’ve played about 185 rounds this year.”
So, like I said, golf is a relative game.
Via jill/txt I came across this article in First Monday, “Beyond Google: How do students conduct academic research?” by Alison J. Head. Yet another example of something I don’t have time and/or am not in the mood to read right now. But the abstract looks quite interesting:
This paper reports findings from an exploratory study about how students majoring in humanities and social sciences use the Internet and library resources for research. Using student discussion groups, content analysis, and a student survey, our results suggest students may not be as reliant on public Internet sites as previous research has reported. Instead, students in our study used a hybrid approach for conducting course–related research. A majority of students leveraged both online and offline sources to overcome challenges with finding, selecting, and evaluating resources and gauging professors’ expectations for quality research.
This seems to fit in with some research that my friend/colleague Bill HD has done on the ways that students multi-task during the research writing process, and the abstract also suggests to me that what students are doing is making audience-based choices. In other words, if the professor will allow the student to “get away” with a lot of internet research, then they’ll use it. If not….
Say, remember how I said Facebook might catch on?
Here’s a link to the current cover story of Newsweek, “Facebook Grows Up: Can it stay relevant?” I haven’t read it yet (and since we get the old-fashioned paper version of this magazine around here, I’ll probably just read it the old fashioned way), but it is a pretty obvious and easy choice for a reading selection for all kinds of teaching situations.