Steven D. Krause

I thought this was kind of cool:

The program for the upcoming CCCCs is online in a searchable database. So instead of one big ol’ PDF file, you can search the program by a key words, area cluster, level of emphasis (4 year, 2 year, K-12, etc.), interest emphasis (class, gender, disability, etc.), type of session, day (really useful for people like me who aren’t going to be there for the whole thing), and speaker name. The results are an entry just like what you’d see in the program, and if you click on the “more” button, you’ll get the full presentation description, which was never available before. You can put together a program for “your conference” based on your searches, email it to yourself, print it out, etc. Pretty neat.

My review of the collection Memory Bytes has been published in the book review section of the Resource Center for Cyberculture Studies, which I’ve always thought of as a very interesting and handy resource. Besides a lot of good book reviews, the RCCS has a ton of great links and other resources.

Anyway, you can read my review by clicking right here. The short version is it’s a very interesting and useful collection of essays, especially because it’s the only one that I know of that actually acknowledges the history that lead to what we now think of as “cyberculture.”

Lore: An E-Journal for Teachers (and kind of a public service from major comp/rhet textbook publisher Bedford-St.Martin’s) has a new section/entry/update/issue (I’m not sure the best term) about using blogs to teach and to supplement the academic life. Click right here to go directly to that part of the Lore. I haven’t had a chance to look at this too closely yet, but it looks like some interesting reflections.

I thought I’d mention two things here, one serious and one not:

* As most computer geeks know by know, Apple has come out with the so-called “headless Mac,” which they are calling the Mac mini. Basically, it’s a Macintosh box for $500– you furnish the monitor, mouse, and keyboard. It’s a G4 processor, which is kind of a shame if you ask me (my next computer will be at least a G5), but it strikes me as a kind of interesting marketing ploy. This isn’t really a device for me, a devoted iBook user. I think the market they are after are folks who are Windoze users but who are really into their iPods, and/or people who are thinking about switching and want to do it on the cheap, and/or people who wouldn’t mind running both platforms with more or less the same equipment. Which is a huge plus of this thing, it seems to me: I don’t think you could plug and unplug the monitor on the fly (but I wouldn’t be surprised if there wasn’t some kind of adapter that would let you let you do that), but I guess what I’m saying is you could have both a Windows PC and a Mac PC on your desk, side by side, and you could switch between the two with the same monitor, keyboard, and mouse after swapping out a few cables. I think that would be kinda nice.

* I very much enjoyed this parody Apple ad I found on the enjoyable blog Gizmodo. It falls into the “funny ’cause it’s kinda true” category of things.

We’re back from Florida, we’ve taken down all the Christmas decorations, we’ve started the Winter semester at EMU, and we’re all back to normal, more or less. So now it’s time to get back on to the diet.

My short-term goal is to lose 15 pounds by March 25, which is my birthday. This strikes me as a reasonable goal, and if I’m successful, I’ll be at my lowest weight in probably about 10 years.

I’m going back to Phase 1 of the South Beach Diet, at least for the first week: no alcohol, no carbs, lots of veggies, low-fat meats, eggs or fake eggs, cheese. I don’t know how long I’ll be able to stick with this part of things, but my hope is that if I fall off the wagon a bit, I’ll fall just to Phase II, which allows for wine (no beer) and high-fiber carbs like whole wheat bread.

I’m also going to be hitting the gym as often as possible. My schedule this semester will allow me to go at least three days a week, sometimes four or five. Since we’re down to one car, I also expect to do quite a bit more walking to and from work.

Keep various things crossed.

From a couple of different places I’ve learned lately about something called Delicious Library 1.1. Basically, it’s a software (Max OSX) where you can use an Apple iSight camera (I suppose you could use a different camera or maybe a scanner or something) to scan the bar code on books, CDs, DVDs, and video games to catalog your library of stuff. It then puts all this information in an interface that pretty much looks like iTunes.

Personally, I think this would be pretty useful because my academic wife and I have hundreds of books (not to mention CDs and DVDs). The result is I don’t know exactly what we have (or don’t have), and I frequently don’t know where a particular copy of a book actually is. Plus I am attracted to the geek aspect of it.

Unfortunately, I don’t think my wife is persuaded. When I described this to her, she said “if you had something where you can scan the bar code and then have the whole contents of a book, then that might be useful.” Hmmm, I think that development is a few years off….

In my capacity as the happy academic, I occasionally field questions from loyal fans who are considering embarking on a happy academic career of their own. Just a couple of weeks ago, I responded to an email from someone asking if they too should consider an academic career. I told this young person that she ought to finish high school and then college first.

In any event, I recently browsed through the Modern Language Association’s “Report on the 2003-04 Job Information List,” available via the Association of Departments of English homepage. This was actually published in the Fall 2004 MLA Newsletter, a document I didn’t receive despite my recent rejoining of that organization. It’s a PDF linked to the ADE’s main page, and it is a document that any future academic in English studies ought to consider.

A report like this only tells a part of the job market story and we are currently in the 2004-05 year, but there are some interesting things present and absent in this report.

• The total number of listings in the English edition of the JIL (in other words, these are jobs in English departments, more or less, as opposed to Spanish or German departments) is down from 1,622 in 2000-2001 to 1,362 in 2003-04.
• The total number of listings in “Composition and Rhetoric” is down as well, from 499 in 2000-01 to 400 in 2003-04. However, “Composition and Rhetoric” still leads the pack in terms of total number of jobs listed. In “second place” on the list of “index terms” is “British Literature;” third is “American Literature;” and fourth is “other.”
• But these numbers are problematic because, as is pointed out in the explanatory part of the report, lots of jobs use multiple index terms– in other words, you’ll see plenty of ads that say something like “assistant professor in American literature and composition and rhetoric.”
• These numbers are also problematic because of the subdivisions within these index terms. Most departments don’t hire people in “American Literature;” rather, most departments hire folks in 19th century American Lit, or 20th century American Lit, or American poetry, or some other specialization. The same is true in composition and rhetoric and British Literature, too.
• Interestingly enough, the report also lists the index terms “business and technical writing,” “English education,” and “technology and digital media.” Most of the time, these terms show up in conjunction with the index term “composition and rhetoric.”

While this report gives a pretty good picture of how many jobs are out there, the “demand” in different fields in English studies, it doesn’t say anything about the “supply” of candidates to take these jobs. And the lack or abundance of “supply” can make a big difference in terms of the “demand.”

I’ve written about this frequently with composition and rhetoric, where the “supply/demand” ratio is relatively balanced. But just to consider a different example, consider the index term “English Education.” According to the report, there were 101 positions in English Education last year, which is not even close to the amount of positions in the “top three” areas. However, what this report doesn’t reflect is that there are very few qualified candidates for these jobs. While candidate pools in American or British can routinely number in the hundreds, candidate pools for English Education searches are frequently in the single digits.

This is not the recipe I use for these cookies, as folks reading this blog know…

See this entry from “The Happy Freaking Ray of Goddamn Sunshine” blog by Dan Wheeler. Some other pretty funny cartoons here, too.

I wouldn’t normally find myself at Whole Foods on a Friday, even in the morning, but I think this is going to change. Generally, I avoid shopping on Fridays because its too busy. But I stopped by there this morning after going to the gym to pick up stuff for the weekend, and I was sort of shocked at the volume of samples that were out. Whole Foods always have some samples of course, but this morning (in preparation of the big shopping day), there were just a ton of things: lots of different cheeses, hams, brie, cookies, whole wheat pizza, fig cake, other kinds of cake, etc., etc. It was enough to hold me over until a late lunch.

One of the people I work with at EMU has worked at Whole Foods off and on for a few years now, and I remember asking him about sampling customers one time. “If someone came in and just stood there in front of that big pile of cheese cubes, scarffing them down, wouldn’t they say something?”

No, he said; in fact, there are plenty of people who come into Whole Foods, put a few items in a grocery cart, and then drift around for an hour or more, grazing, eating Australian cheddar or whatever by the handful. I wouldn’t go so far as to go in there, eat, and then leave; but I’ll probably be “dining” there next week.

As I wrote about back on Christmas day, I am planning on experimenting with WebCT this semester for a class I’m teaching, but I had run into some problems with the server being down. Well, that, and the sheer clumsiness of WebCT.

Anyway, here I am today, using this snow day to get myself caught up, ready to get this class organized and to get up to speed on WebCT, and again, I can’t connect. What I get is “An unexpected system exception has occurred.” I don’t know if it’s a “mac issue” (ever notice how people who administer systems like WebCT want to blame the user’s choice of computer platform, especially if it’s a mac?), if it’s because I am trying to connect from a WiFi network in a coffee shop, if it’s because of the snow day, or what. But this makes two times where I allocated time to work on WebCT stuff and haven’t been able to do it.

I want to give this stuff a chance, but frankly, I don’t think I can risk it for this class. I can’t expect my students to rely on a system that is this unreliable. I might change my mind later, but I think my work with WebCT this semester (and perhaps beyond) will remain experimental.