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Once again, not this year…

It’s another November, and that means it’s another National Novel Writing Month, another month where I am unlikely to write a novel. Oh, well…. Actually, I think this is a great idea, but the problem I (and nearly every other academic I know) is that November is a pretty crazy month as far as work goes.

Anyway, I have two thoughts for now. First, it’s worthwhile checking out this site once in a while since they have some interesting stories about people participating in NaNoWriMo. Second, I have recommended to graduate students stuck on their final projects the book about all this written by the founder of this “dare,” Chris Baty, No Plot, No Problem. Baty is of course talking about fiction writing, but I have to say I admire so many of his techniques for just “getting it down” on a page (or, I suppose, a screen) that are in this book. Stuck on a writing project? Buy this book.

In the meantime, check out the site.

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Can high school kids get dooced?

Via the NCTE InBox email they send around every once in a while, I discovered this USA Today article, “Students, officials locking horns over blogs.” Here’s a passage I think is kind of interesting:

School boards across the country already have blocked sites such as MySpace and Facebook on school computers. But school districts now are reaching into students’ home computers, severely punishing and even expelling students for what they write on those sites from home.

Some examples:

•A student at an Indianapolis-area school was expelled for making sexually explicit comments about a teacher on MySpace.

•Officials at a Pittsburgh school kicked a student off the volleyball team for an Internet message that criticized an art teacher.

•A cheerleader at a Fort Worth-area school was kicked off the squad for derogatory comments someone posted on her blog about other cheerleaders.

The issue has created a free-speech debate between school administrators who are worried about the disruption of the learning process on one hand; and students, parents and First Amendment advocates who are worried about whether overzealous school boards are overstepping their bounds on the other. The debate is beginning to be explored in courts.

“Some courts have said that speech which is done on school computers is clearly within the domain of the administration to set reasonable standards for. Some have said if it’s off-site, then the students are fully protected. Some have said if it can be read by people on the school premises, then it comes within the jurisdiction of the school board,” says Tom Clarke, a San Francisco attorney who works on First Amendment questions. “Those are the three crazy standards that currently exist.”

I must say though– and they kind of talk about this later in the article– schools are kind of between a rock and a hard place on this one. I mean, one of the critiques against the Columbine-type tragedies is that these students are giving off warning signs, and they are often giving off warning signs in writing. Of course, banning these writings doesn’t stop them.

Oh, and in case you are wondering: to be “dooced” is web/blog lingo for being fired.

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Halloweening 2006




Will Darth, Lounging

Originally uploaded by steven_d_krause.

I was thinking this morning, when I was taking some of these pictures of Will as Darth, what a series of costumes that he has gone through over the years. It seems like just yesterday when Will was dressed as Blue and I had to go through all sorts of rig-a-ma-roll to get a shirt to look like Steve. A couple of years ago, Will was a knight. A few years before that, I think, he was a gladiator.

And this year, Darth.

I guess I like to see that as a sign of progress and maturity. But maybe that’s just me.

Dueling DarthsAnyway, Halloween also included a “Halloween parade” and various parties at Will’s school that Annette attended. My favorite picture from that is this one with Will (in the mask) giving a friend, also dressed as Darth Vader, the bunny ears. Just the sort of thing that any evil villain should do.

Halloween festivities actually began around here a couple of weeks ago during Will’s and my annual adventure to the pumpkin patch and our carving session last night. I was pretty pleased with the results, and, as this picture shows, we only had some modest squirrel damage, unlike some previous years:


Three cool pumpkins with modest squirrel damage


Of course, the real point of Halloween– and this is why it is fundamentally a children’s holiday– is the candy and the trick or treating. I’ve written in previous years about my humbug-ness about some of the trick and/or treating that happens around here, and I won’t relive that now. All I will say for the time-being is that mild weather brought what I have to think is a record number of T&T commuters. We were out of candy by 7:00pm.

Will and his friend Gage certainly made a good haul. After they got done, they came back and began the process of sorting and then trading candy:


Two gummie bears for a gum drop

This activity had the chance of turning into an all-night affair, so Annette and Gage’s mother broke it up pretty quick.

And then it was time for Darth to go off to bed, snuggling with his plastic light saber and his doggie.

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Good Wikipedia Article; as usual, Academics have "mixed feelings"

One of the things I’m supposed to be doing right now is planning for my online version of English 516 (a graduate course called “Computers and Writing, Theory and Practice”) in Winter 2007, and preparing/proposing an online version of the class English 444 (which is “Writing for the World Wide Web”) for Spring 2006. One reading that might be useful for both of these classes comes from last week’s CHE, “Can Wikipedia Ever Make the Grade?” I think it does a good job of kind of covering the “issues” with Wikipedia in terms of what it means as an academic source, meaning it doesn’t settle anything (how could it do that?), but it raises lots of good questions in an easy to access piece.

Personally, I think the argument that wrong stuff can be (and usually is) quickly changed is the most compelling reason as to why Wikipedia is, for the most part, a “trustworthy” source. I suppose we could (and when it comes to teaching classes like FY Comp, I suppose you have to) debate the idea of Wikipedia being source for “research,” but my basic answer to that for myself is that it is pretty much the same as using an encyclopedia as a “research” source: both might be useful to get started, but neither is a real source.

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Facebook in; MySpace out?

From today’s Washington Post, “In Teens’ Web World, MySpace Is So Last Year.” Here are the opening paragraphs of the article:

Teen Web sensation MySpace became so big so fast, News Corp. spent $580 million last year to buy it. Then Google Inc. struck a $900 million deal, primarily to advertise with it. But now Jackie Birnbaum and her fellow English classmates at Falls Church High School say they’re over MySpace.

“I think it’s definitely going down — a lot of my friends have deleted their MySpaces and are more into Facebook now,” said Birnbaum, a junior who spends more time on her Facebook profile, where she messages and shares photos with other students in her network.

From the other side of the classroom, E.J. Kim chimes in that in the past three months, she’s gone from slaving over her MySpace profile up to four hours a day — decorating it, posting notes and pictures to her friends’ pages — to deleting the whole thing.

“I’ve grown out of it,” Kim said. “I thought it was kind of pointless.”

Dang– and this after I’ve tricked out my MySpace page! (well, okay, maybe not…).

For what it’s worth though, I think this is one thing to point to as evidence about why “blogging” and “social networking sites” like MySpace are actually two different things.

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A good night for vampires…

Boo!Last night, Annette went to an event for the undergrad English majors club (really, literature majors club), so Will and I had a “Daddy/Will night” event: we went to see the classic silent film Nosferatu at the Michigan Theater in Ann Arbor. A silent film, you ask? Yes, but with orchestral accompaniment, which included things like this weird wind sound effect machine, lots of other percussion, and, of course, the theater organ. And as an aside here: this is one of those reasons why I like living in this area and why we probably will be moving to Ann Arbor eventually, that it is possible to see classic silent films with music as a special event at a place like the Michigan Theater.

Anyway, it was a dark and stormy night, so that seemed to be a perfect atmosphere for seeing one of the classic (perhaps the classic?) horror/vampire film. Lots of other people thought the same thing; the place was about 2/3rds full, including the balcony.

How was it, you ask? Well, for starters, it was less than scary, which probably suited Will just fine. I’m sure the horror effect was in part diluted by the giggling junior high boys who sat behind us. But beyond that, the melodramatic and dated acting and not great special effects didn’t instill fear. I guess it was scary 80 or so years ago.

But it was still pretty cool to see, at least for me. There’s a ton of stuff in this movie that has been repeated over and over again in countless other movies, and it is one of those things that anyone who has even a remotely serious interest in film has to see. Again and again even Will was able to point out when a “famous scene” came on the screen. And the music was very cool too.

I’d say go see it yourself, but it was a one-shot deal. I guess I would say instead that you should go see another one of the other silent films they show there once in a while.

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Daily photo project

This morning via yahoo, I came across this “daily photo” project. There’s a video at the site that shows a time-lapse of this guy’s self-portraits over the last seven or so years, from the time he was 22 until now. I’m not sure, but this seems like a pretty, um, self-involved thing to me. And it doesn’t so much show off the process of aging as it shows the changes in this kid’s hairstyles. Still, it’s kinda cool….

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NPR, Blogs, and Slang

I heard two good stories on NPR’s “All Things Considered” which might be good teaching resources some time this coming winter. First, there was “Blogs Capture, Amplify Galludet Protest,” which is about how a couple of bloggers covered the ongoing problems at Galludet in DC. Given the nature of the story, there’s a transcript at this site, too.

On a completely different topic, there was also this story, “American Slang, Adapted and Updated.” This is an interview with Paul Dickson on an updated version of a dictionary he has on slang. I thought that this might be an interesting thing to think about in a first year composition class, actually….