Writer, Professor, and Everything Else
On the Colbert Report tonight, they had a little report on about something that’s being served at some minor league baseball park that is essentially a cheeseburger with a Krispy Kreme doughnut as a bun.
Now, look: I’m all about the cheeseburgers, and I’m all about the Krispy Kreme. Together? I dunno, that sounds kinda gross.
Though maybe it has a “sweet ‘n salty” kinda thing, like the pretzels in Chubby Hubby ice cream….
Click here to see a more complete story.
I can’t say that I’ve been somewhat MIA on my blog simply because I’ve been working super-duper hard on talks that I’m giving at the CCCCs and at the Jacobson Symposium in Omaha the following week. That’s only part of it. The week before last was winter break, and while I did blog and work a lot while in Florida, I also vacationed a lot too, which means that I fell too far behind on work things due this past week. And there was also a fistful of meetings and other obligations in the department. It was one of those weeks that felt like two weeks.
Anyway, even if I haven’t been working super-hard on my presentations, I have been working. I’m not completely done with either of these spiels but I have good starts on both and, in a sense, they are both written in my head already. This is not to say that I am ready to give these talks, nor is it to say that I am going to just “wing it.” But I’m getting there.
I know that I’ve written about this here in the past– actually, almost exactly a year ago— but it’s on my mind so I’ll say it again: in the choice between conference performance styles of someone “reading a paper” versus “speaking/talking extemporaneously,” I say “reading a paper” wins out. Listening to someone read something out loud that isn’t meant to be read out loud can be painful, but I think it is much worse to listen to someone, ah, “wing it.” Let me put it to you this way: just “winging it” often ends up being a bit like singing in the shower: sure, it sounds fine in there to you, but try that in front of other people and it usually goes poorly. So, IMO, unless you’re a really REALLY good public speaker and/or you basically have a presentation that you wrote previously memorized, it’s probably best to read something.
If my speaking role is small/short, obviously interactive, and/or extremely casual, I prepare some notes– possibly a hand-out– and that’s about it. These sorts of settings would include what at the CCCCs are called “Special Interest Groups,” workshops (which are basically the same as teaching and things like that tend to be too interactive to plan too carefully), roundtable discussions, etc.
But if my speaking role is not short, which is the case for both of the things I have upcoming, I need to write a script. And I say “a script” as opposed to “a paper” or “an article” because I think a presentation script has to sound good in a way that’s different from something meant completely for the page, and it has to be relatively short. In my experience, a 15-20 minute presentation should be about eight pages long, double-spaced. And better to be the speaker whose presentation is a little short than the one who is still rambling on after 25 minutes.
There are two different things I’m playing around with this year that are new for me. First, PowerPoint slides, and lots and lots of ’em. At last year’s CCCCs, I went to see a fantastic presentation by Lawrence Lessig. Most of Lessig’s fantastic-ness was the very smart things he had to say, but almost as impressive to me was the “show” of his presentation, which included about a million slides. Most of them were very simple– just a few words on a screen– but the effect was fantastic. So while I’m not hoping to imitate Lessig exactly, I am going to have a bunch of slides in the spirit of Lessig.
Well, that and Stephen Colbert’s “The Wørd” segments on his Comedy Central show. In other words, I’m hoping to have a lot of slides that are a combination of informative and entertaining.
Assuming the LCD projector works, of course.
The second thing I’m playing around with– probably after the conference, actually, though who knows, maybe before– is this software that Collin mentioned recently in this post which is supposed to make it easy to merge audio and PowerPoint (or Keynotes) presentations and end up with an mp4 multimedia presentation. The software is called Profcast, and other than what I just wrote, I have no idea how it works yet. If I get around to finishing my presentations soon, I’ll let you know….
Today it was about 65 or so degrees out, and in this neck of the woods and at this time of the year, that’s usually time to run around outside half-naked and rejoice at the end of winter. Of course, we’ve had a pretty mild winter this year. Oh, and also of course, what inevitably happens when we have a “warm snap” like this is it snows about a week or two later.
Anyway, besides watching the Hawks win the Big Ten tourney and making my NCAA picks (I’ve got Connecticut winning it all, but just for the hell of it, I picked Iowa to go to the final four), I went out and hit a bucket of golf balls at the newly remodeled Miles of Golf. Not that there is really a whole lot of “remodeling” that needs to be done to the driving range part of the operation.
It felt pretty good swinging a club after not doing so for around four or five months. I was hitting them about as well (or as poorly) as I was in the fall. Two thoughts occurred to me. First, not this summer (because I’m once again going to be out of town for too much of it and because of other things coming up) but some summer, I’m going to take some golf lessons. Second, my goal this year is not to worry so much about the “long game,” mainly because without something in the way of lessons, I don’t really see myself hitting the ball a whole lot further than I do right now. Rather, I need to concentrate on the short game: approaches, chips, putts. Unfortunately, that’s kind of hard to practice at a range.
Anyway, after things settle down in April, I’ll be back out. Unless it snows.
I don’t want to obsess or dwell on the whole MySpace thing, but we were talking about blog issues in my grad class Monday, so it seems like a good time to post about some of the things we talked about in class.
MySpace controversies have become local, as is evident in this and this Detroit Free Press articles. To quote from the first one:
A presentation by two Lakeview High School students trying to warn classmates about the dangers of putting personal information on the Internet led to their teacher being escorted from the St. Clair Shores building because administrators thought pictures used in the project were too risque.
The segment, roughly eight minutes, that was broadcast to the entire school Tuesday on its in-house TV network featured pictures students in the district had posted on MySpace.com. They showed students drinking, posing provocatively or partially nude, and in one case kissing a vodka bottle.
I don’t know exactly what the deal is here (though if someone can hunt down this video that these kids put together for their school, I’d love to see it), but as far as I can tell from these two articles, while the student report was accurate and probably useful, it also featured stuff that really shows up on MySpace that school officials would rather not know about.
Anyway, my graduate course this semester features about five or so high school teachers, and without a doubt, the rules are different there than they are in (so-called) higher ed. For me, it’s one thing for me to see pictures of students (even mine) drinking or wearing swimwear or whatever; it’s another thing entirely when you’ve got high school kids– minors– doing these things.
On the other hand, this is what “the kids” are doing, as they say. One of my students, who is a high school teacher around here, brought up some MySpace pages from kids in his classes, and these pages featured pictures of scantily clad young people, lots of drinking, etc., etc. Now, this puts my student, these other students’ teacher, into a kind of problematic place because since these kids are, well, kids, my student/their teacher does have at least some (potentially) responsibility here.
The other thing that makes it tough for these high school teacher-types is the broad spectrum of reactions from stake-holders. On the one side, you’ve got parents and teachers who are outraged (outraged, I tell you!) that teenagers are getting together and drinking and doing sexually risque things, and the absolute last thing these people want to do is talk about these things (or sex education or drug use or whatever) with kids in school– it’ll put the wrong idea in their mushy heads. On the complete other side of the spectrum though, you’ve got parents (at least according to my students who are high school teachers) who are so out of touch with their kids or so overly tolerant of the behavior of their children that they’ve become enablers, the kinds of parents who buy the kids the kegs on the theory that “at least they’re drinking where I can see them.” These parents probably don’t care if their fifteen year-old daughter is posing on her MySpace pages in a skimpy bikini with a bottle of vodka in one hand a cup of beer in the other. And in a sense, these parents are as big of a problem for high school teachers since these are the people that are driving the first group of parents over the edge.
Me? Hey, my students are adults whether they want to admit that or not. I think it’s ill-advised for them to post pictures of themselves doing drunk and stupid things, but it’s their problem. I’m not going to call their parents. And my son is 8, so for at least a few years, I don’t think we’re going to have to worry too much about this.
One of the things we did in class Monday night was actually sign up for a MySpace account, and anyone who is curious about this space ought to do the same thing. For one thing, MySpace’s “age of consent” for participating in its forums is 14, which strikes me as a bit young, at least too young without some kind of parental consent. As I understand it (I can’t remember where I read this), MySpace started as a space for 18 and above, and then they lowered the age to 16, and then 14. That seems a pretty crass way to get more users.
The other significant thing (I think) is when you sign up for a MySpace account, you see almost immediately how this is really a social networking software about “hooking up” in all the meanings of that term and it is not a writerly space. And actually, it seems to be kind of a swarmy social space. The first thing you do with MySpace is you set up your “background and profile;” the first point there is “Marital status;” and the first button option is “swinger.” The second thing you fill out is your sexual orientation. Click on over to “networking,” and there’s a “field” option, which seems like a good idea at first– I could maybe “network” with fellow teachers or writers or students or what-have-you. But those aren’t the fields they have in mind. Instead, the fields listed don’t include education and they do include dance, fashion, film, gaming, television, and nightlife. Oh, and each one of these has a sub-field and a role; so, for example, if you select “dance,” you can then easily select “performer” and then select “exotic dancer.”
And as far as blogging goes: it’s easy to upload and display pictures on MySpace, but the blogging function seems buried to me, and most of the MySpace pages I’ve seen just don’t include one.
So I don’t know. On the one hand, I still think that there are many mountains made out of MySpace mole hills in the press. I don’t think MySpace is to blame for getting kids killed at a party (we don’t blame the phone company for these kinds of things either), I think that MySpace is merely making activities that teenagers have done forever visible to a large audience, and an audience that clearly is much larger than most of these kids realize. I’m not in favor of school districts closing MySpace access down, and I am in favor of using MySpace as a “teaching moment.”
On the other hand, MySpace really is pretty stupid.
I don’t usually blog about TV shows specifically, but I just got done watching the premiere of The Unit, which is a show on CBS about a military unit sort of along the lines of “Delta Force,” though this particular unit, which appears to be made up of four people, is one of those so secret that it doesn’t officially exist kinds of deals.
I’m not much of a conspiracy theorist, but I suspect that the “reality” of this show is closer to the reality of secret military operations than, say CSI is to forensic investigation. I mean, I think CSI is a great show and everything, but Jesus, can’t these people turn on some damn lights or something?
I digress.
In the first episode of The Unit, we see the team do all kinds of cool military things to thwart a terrorist attack while they jump back and forth to the wives of the older and more experienced Unit folks coax the new wife into the fold.
Well, that’s not a very good description, is it? But trust me, it’s a good show. Check it out next week.
Well, here is is, real beer, the homebrew that I had a very modest part in. Actually, I first opened one of these babies late Wednesday night after we got back home after a long flight home from Florida. I mentioned it in an email to brewmaster Bill and fellow beer watcher Steve B., and Bill asked “Well, where’s the blog entry?”
Okay, here ya go.
A few more details, at least a rating according to this stuff on ratebeer.com:
We’re having a party here in a couple of weeks, and it’s going to be touch and go to see if there is any of that beer left. Hmm, beer….
Before I get out the door and go to school….
The EMU faculty union is actually a chapter of the American Association of University Professors. We’ve been associated with the AAUP since the union was organized in 1974. But apparently, there is a movement to get out of the AAUP and associate ourselves with the Michigan Education Association. And the AAUP local is obviously concerned. Today, I received a packet of materials in the snail mail from the union about why we should stay with the AAUP and why we shouldn’t get ourselves messed up in the raiding MEA union.
I realize that this stuff is probably not that interesting to people who are not at EMU, but since there are enough EMU folks who stumble across this blog once in a while, I thought I’d post a few thoughts (while I’m watching the Iowa/Wisconsin basketball game):
I wasn’t paying much attention to these issues when I was at SOU, but the faculty union there seemed to handle things well. Why couldn’t we do that at EMU? Instead of sending our dues off to some national or state organization, why not keep it all local?
Of course, I do kinda like a good bratwurst….
In an effort to catch up on blog reading and procrastinate from the things I ought to really be doing, I offer this long list of useful (to me) links to readings/entries from blogs in my RSS feed published in the last week or so:
I think that’s it– heck, isn’t that enough?
Remember the “Brokemac Mountain” parody I posted a couple of weeks ago? Well, via my blog surfing this morning, I came across this site with links to dozens of parodies of Brokeback Mountain. I think the Top Gun parody is especially funny.
If want a bit of sophisticated analysis about these “mash-ups,” check out this entry from the excellent if:book blog.