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Hang in there, Iowa City

You have probably heard that Iowa City got a direct hit by a tornado on Thursday. I have been looking at some pictures on flickr and through the images that are posted on this DesMoinesRegister.com web site. I won’t post any of those images here– that strikes me as somewhat ghoulish for some reason– but I’d encourage you to go and look. One of the things that has got to be a problem here, especially for all of the students in apartments who are displaced, is that these college kids don’t have any sort of insurance, for the most part. I certainly never had renter’s insurance; maybe the college kids today are smarter than I was.

I lived in Iowa City while I attended the University of Iowa from 1984 to 1988, and I really did feel like I “lived” there, that I wasn’t just a student resident who was simply occupying a space and living out of a suitcase. Still, I haven’t lived there in 17 years, and I really haven’t been back much, either. I’ve stopped in a few times on trips back home, done a bit of shopping downtown and met up with some different folks and such, but that’s about it. I have one old friend who lives there (she’s pretty much lived there her whole life), and she reports to me that there’s been a lot of damage, though it sounds like she managed to not have any storm problems herself.

Oh, and a lot of the damage appears to have been in a part of town where I didn’t actually live or hang around much. So to me, even though I was there for years and even though I have always liked Iowa City a great deal, much of the damage looks anonymous to me. Even though I know it’s not.

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What Apple's "Boot Camp" might mean to me (and many other Apple users in academia)

Just another quick post: while I was waiting for my movie file to upload, I skimmed through this snarky MacWorld article/tit-for-tat comment on an article in USA Today. You can read this exchange for yourself if you’re interested. I got bored.

That is not to say that I’m not excited about Apple’s Bootcamp software, which allow users to boot into Windoze on the new intel chip Macs. I think this is going to be a useful thing for Mac users (like me) in academia in general, and at places like EMU (which is about 50-50 Mac/Windoze), for our labs and for faculty desktops (at least my desktop).

Assuming it all works right and everything, Boot Camp will allow us to reconfigure our computer labs to be both OS 10.x and Windoze. Right now, for reasons that have largely been forgotten, we have a Mac lab and a Windoze lab. What I’d like to see us do is replace the computers in both of these labs with iMacs that are all configured to run either Apple stuff or Windoze stuff. If there’s a particular piece of instructional software that can only run on the PC or the Mac, no problem.

And besides that, students have a choice. I teach in the Mac lab, and I get all kinds of students complain about having to work on a Mac. (I should point out most of these complaints are based on the less then compelling argument, “this isn’t what I’m used to working with!” But I digress…). With this new configuration, I could simply tell this hypothetical and Windoze-obsessed student to just reboot and pick a different OS and stop complaining about the Mac.

Second, it will allow me to run Windoze software once in a while. Of course, no one is going to go out and buy a Mac just to run Windoze– that’d be stupid. But it’d be very nice to be able to do some Windoze stuff, even if it wouldn’t be on the fly. For example, there are a couple of scheduling/admissions-type software programs at EMU which I would like to be able to use occassionally but which are Windoze only. This is stuff I wouldn’t use every day all day long, just once in a while, and this is exactly the strength of this Boot Camp option.

Another example: I have students who come to my office all the time with some sort of problem with their web site, and when I show them what to do, I right now have to say stuff like “now, on your Windoze computer at home, it’s going to look a little different.” Boot Camp will allow me to say “hang on, let me reboot…. okay, here’s how it is going to look on your computer at home.”

Sweet. Bring me my new iMac, please.

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My entry into "filmmaking" (and probably not my last)

Despite the fact that I have had some version of iMovie since that software came out (after all, I’ve always had a Mac), I’ve never really played around with it. I suppose this is because I never felt like I had much use for it.

I don’t know what I was thinking. I guess I’m just a little slow on the uptake.

So I have made my first entry into the world of “filmmaking” (really, screencasting would probably be a better term) with a MOV version of the first three parts of the talk I gave at the Jacobson Symposium. Here’s a link; be warned that it’s 88 MB.

I’m not entirely pleased with the quality of it for a couple of different reasons. First, I don’t think my “performance” as a speaker was that good, meaning that while I thought the content of what I said was okay, I didn’t think I was in as good of voice as I should have been– a lot of coughs and pauses and such.

Second, and more significant, the quality of the imported PowerPoint slide images is suspect at best, if you ask me. This is especially true with the lettering. I think a smarter approach might be to try to trick the “credits” feature in iMovie to behave the way that I want. Unless someone with more experience than I in these things has a better idea….

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The Happy Academic knew it all along: Being a professor is a good gig

According to a CNN/Money Magazine rating, being a college professor is the second best job you can have. Sounds great, right? Well, sorta.

As I have mentioned many times here before, I think being a college professor is a great gig, and when people complain about being in academia (which is the subject of so many academic blogs, especially the pseudoanonymous ones), my basic reaction is always the same: this beats the heck out of most jobs, hands down.

However, I think the CNN/Money Magazine ranking is a bit problematic for several reasons. Let’s start with the first three paragraphs about “why it’s great:”

While competition for tenure-track jobs will always be stiff, enrollment is rising in professional programs, community colleges and technical schools — which means higher demand for faculty.

It’s easier to break in at this level, and often you can teach with a master’s and professional experience. Demand is especially strong in fields that compete with the private sector (health science and business, for example).

The category includes moonlighting adjuncts, graduate TAs and college administrators.

So, in sum, it’s “great” for a)people teaching in “the professions” (as opposed to, say, English or writing or that vast space called “the humanities”); it’s easy to “break in” as long as you are in a field where you could make a lot more money in the private sector; and, by including adjuncts, TAs, and administrators, they are lumping together several very different kinds of jobs.

I do agree with them that what’s “cool” about the job includes “Professors have near-total flexibility in their schedules. Creative thinking is the coin of the realm. No dress code!” But obviously, they are minimalizing the ease of getting into the college professor racket, and I wish I made close to the quoted “average” salary of $81,000.

By the way, this “study” claims that best job is “software engineer.” That is clearly wrong. I think the best job one could have is “wealthy philanthropist” and/or “man/woman about town.” But maybe that’s just me.

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"MySpace Adds a Security Monitor;" a ploy to not be sued?

According to this NPR “All Things Considered” report from last night, MySpace has hired Hemanshu Nigam, “a former prosecutor from the Justice Department to patrol the site and educate its users.” I thought it was an interesting report for a couple of reasons:

  • The reporters referred to MySpace as a “Social Networking Site” where much of the goal was to be “cool.” I like this because they did not call MySpace a “blog” (which of course it isn’t), and they did describe the primary purpose of MySpace of being cool.
  • MySpace is walking a very delicate line between having a certain level of security to satisfy parents but also not curtailing the “cool factor” by hiring a narc. There might be 69 million users of MySpace right now, but (as the report said) these users are fickle and could just as easily switch to the “next big thing.” After all, a lot of these users used to be on Friendster. Danah Boyd argues there’s a difference between the services, but then again, maybe there isn’t.
  • As the report made clear, it’s fuzzy at best the number of cases of sexual predators and such that happens in relation to MySpace. The Los Angeles Times reporter being interviewed about the story, Chris Gaither, said that in LA county, about 10 cases of pedophiles or other sex crimes are associated with MySpace. Ten or so, and I’ll bet there’s more than a million users in LA county, too.

Anyway, an interesting piece worth checking out.

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A comic to remember for later… and potentially why…

First things first: the comic for later is PoCom-UP-001, which was a group/collaborative comic of enormous propotions. It’s a pretty slick flash interface, too. Scott McCloud used this in his talk recently as an example of his concept of the “infinite canvas” possible for comics on the web.

Second, some of you, especially those of you who have witnessed my pooh-poohing of the role of “visual rhetoric” in teaching, may be wondering why I’m interested at all in this comic stuff. Two basic reasons. First, while I’m still not convinced that overt attention to “the visual” has that much of a role in introductory writing classes (at least the introductory classes we have here at EMU because of factors that involve both the students and the poor access to computer lab facilities), I am very convinced it’s important in the advanced undergraduate writing class I teach all the time.

And comics play a role there because for the last couple of semesters, I’ve been teaching a simple comic writing/analysis exercise. This has partly been the result of Linda AK’s influence (a HUGE comic fan), and also because of Scott McCloud’s campus visit. Anyway, I came up with a comic assignment– here’s a version of it— and I think it has been reasonably successful. I’m set to teach this course online again this spring/summer (alas, not next school year though), and I’m planning on switching things up a bit. And I want to include some other “wacky” examples of comics.

Which is why I’m linking now.

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“I am the most beautiful dog in the world”

I stumbled across this while reading one of my student’s blogs just now. I think it’s funny, especially in relation to our dog, who is just the most spastic dog in the world, which would be hard to capture in a comic. Annette and I went for a walk on this nature path in Ann Arbor, and we decided to take the little spaz with us. I tried to take some decent pictures, but that never worked out. Sophie got twice the workout of us, zigging and zagging, and just about pulled both of our arms out of our sockets pulling on the leash. She spent much time choking herself to the point of turning her tongue a slightly pale shade of blue.

All that excitement has left her with some sort of, er, tummy issues. I hope she’s not pooping too much in the house while we’re both away….

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writing.emich.edu : A server in the making…

The dust of the CCCCs and the Jacobson Symposium is starting to clear (though I am late on a different writing project and then there’s that pesky teaching stuff I need to do until the end of the term), and pretty soon, I (along with my colleague Steve Benninghoff) will start setting up the writing program’s new server, writing.emich.edu.

Loyal readers may recall that I have reported here and here that I’ve had a series of problems with the EMU ICT folks regarding serving stuff that involves MySQL and PHP, which is basically any content management system you can think of. Long story short: I asked in September or so the powers that be regarding computer stuff on campus if I could run a CMS like WordPress and drupal on an EMU server. After receiving the run-around for about four months, the answer I received was “no,” and the reason I was given was “uh… security… yeah, security, that’s it.” After a bit more probing, the real answer emerged, which is basically a combination of “we don’t have the resources” and “we don’t want to.”

So, it became apparent that if we are going to do any of these things, we are going to have to do it ourselves, and I am happy to report that my department head, who thankfully understood the issues here, approved the purchase of a Mac Mini, which is chained to my desk and the home of writing.emich.edu.

Or future home. There’s not much there yet.

Frankly, I would prefer to not be in the server business, but if the people who are supposed to be doing this don’t have the will— er, “resources”– to do their job, I guess we’ll have to do it ourselves.

One more kind of funny because it’s sad kind of thing about this: when I was at Creighton for the Jacobson Symposium, some of the folks there thought it was interesting and strange that I was allowed to run a server out of my office. Personally, I found it interesting and strange that the tech area at Creighton, which they call DoIT, seems most interested in trying to provide faculty and students technologies and support to help them do their jobs. What a strange world….