Author: Steve Krause

Update: As my wife pointed out, “everywhere” is not the same as “to all the states in the US.” I knew that all along, but in the interest of accuracy, I made a title change…

Oh, and as long as we’re “going there,” it seems to me that there ought to be another category in this little meme: states in which one spent at least one night versus states in which one merely passed through.

Something I came across while I should have been doing something else:

bold the states you’ve been to, underline the states you’ve lived in and italicize the state you’re in now…

Alabama / Alaska / Arizona / Arkansas / California / Colorado / Connecticut / Delaware / Florida / Georgia / Hawaii / Idaho / Illinois / Indiana / Iowa / Kansas / Kentucky / Louisiana / Maine / Maryland / Massachusetts / Michigan / Minnesota / Mississippi / Missouri / Montana / Nebraska / Nevada / New Hampshire / New Jersey / New Mexico / New York / North Carolina / North Dakota / Ohio / Oklahoma / Oregon / Pennsylvania / Rhode Island / South Carolina / South Dakota / Tennessee / Texas / Utah / Vermont / Virginia / Washington / West Virginia / Wisconsin / Wyoming / Washington D.C /

Go HERE to have a form generate the HTML for you.

I stumbled into the second half of an interesting show on the PBS show NOW about broadband internet access. Here’s a link to a web site about the show. The part that I watched was about the efforts of different cities (Philadelphia and some really small town in Indiana were the examples) to set up locally owned and operated broadband Internet networks, and the efforts of companies like Comcast, Verizon, SBC, etc. to block it. Interesting stuff.

I think I’ve mentioned this in this blog before, but my hometown of Cedar Falls, Iowa has had a municipally owned utility company for years and years. About a dozen years ago, CFU bought out whatever company it was that was providing cable TV, and maybe as many as ten years ago, they started providing broadband internet access. I don’t know how the business model works out, but in terms of Internet access, Cedar Falls is way wired.

I came across this site this morning, The Political Compass. Basically, it’s a long survey which, based on to what extent you agree or disagree with a series of statements, calculates where you are at in the political spectrum. What’s interesting is that it isn’t as simple as “right/left”, “Republican”/”Democrat”, “red state”/”blue state.” Rather, it calculates your location on the political spectrum in quadrants– the “compass,” if you will.

I don’t know who put this thing together, and some of the statements they use to position your politics seem more useful (“The death penalty should be an option for the most serious crimes”) than others (“Abstract art that doesn’t represent anything shouldn’t be considered art at all”). But it’s still kind of interesting.

By the way, my answers put me in the lower left quadrant of the compass, which is the same place where you’ll find Gandhi, The Dali Lama, and Nelson Mandela. So I got that going for me.

My first Winter Break work activity is sorting through email and, simultaneously, procrastinating/discovering stuff on the web. Here are a couple of links to thinks I want to remember for teaching that involves computers and writing kinds of things (English 516, maybe 328, other classes that have a computers and writing sorta theme, etc.):

• I downloaded Jeff Rice’s essay “Cyborgography: A Pedagogy of the Home Page” that appears in the journal Pedagogy, Winter 2005 (5.1). It’s available via Project Muse. I’ve only had a chance to skim it so far, but it seems like it would be useful for a couple of different classes I teach.
• All around cool computers and writing woman and fellow VCU Creative Writing program alum Cheryl Ball posted a bunch of links to Tech-Rhet a week and a half ago to things about hypertext that I think would be cool to think about teaching, maybe even this semester in Writing for the World Wide Web. They are:
  “Hypertext Gardens: Delightful Vistas” by Mark Bernstein
  A PDF version of this essay (which Cheryl uses to compare the formats– kinda cool)
  “Patterns of Hypertext,” yet another site by Bernstein (Cheryl claims not to be a huge Bernstein fan, but…)
• The CMS Matrix, which is a boatload of different CMS setups, and opensourceCMS.com, which allows you to test out these systems (somehow– I haven’t figured out how yet). Both of these links come from Charlie “Cyberdash” Lowe, who also has a good posting on his blog where he shares his thoughts on the subject.
• “Bud the Teacher,” which is a blog by a guy who teaches high school about using blogs to teach at the K-12 level of things. Good stuff.

Okay. Going through my email and putting these links some place means I get to check something else off my “to do” list.

I’m not remotely religious, but the “Jesus Dress Up!” site is one that even makes me go “ew, that’s bad taste.” But it’s also pretty darn funny.

This coming week is spring winter break around here, though since I don’t teach on Fridays this semester, my break started yesterday. It’s called winter break here at EMU because this semester is not spring but winter semester (spring term runs from the beginning of May to the end of June, and summer term goes from the beginning of July to the end of August), and because it is very much winter in late February in Michigan.

In any event, this winter break is and isn’t a “break” for me. For the first time in several years, we’re not off to visit my in-laws in Florida or anyplace else; we’re just hanging around the house. This has its advantages and disadvantages: going someplace warm in the Michigan winter is always nice, but not having to deal with the hassles of travel and staying in the comfort of our own house is nice too.

This week is a break in that I am not required to go into my office and I won’t be teaching any classes. On the other hand, it isn’t a break because I will probably end up in my office at least once for a variety of different reasons, I have a bit of grading to do, I have a fair amount of prep work for teaching after the break, and I’m certain that I will have some email contact with students.

And it really isn’t a break because of some scholarly projects. I’m woefully behind on a few things and I am determined (required?) to get some significant chunks of things off to various editors no later than a week from now. So it’s probably good that I have time to devote to this work this week, but it also means I am lacking an excuse for not getting this work done.

Jeesh. I guess I’m looking forward to school starting up again!

Without going into any detail as to why these articles are on my mind (more on that in a couple of weeks, I hope), I thought I’d point to a couple of articles in the careers section of The Chronicle of Higher Education that are about things I’ve been thinking about lately:

• “Waiting for the Phone to Ring” is a column by a couple of academic career counselors where they are giving advice about what to do while waiting to find out more about that faculty position you interviewed for months ago. As Tom Petty says, the waiting is the hardest part.
• “Deadlines and Due Dates” by Madison “not his real name” Randolph is essentially a meditation about the challenges and joys of one professor (a fellow happy academic, I suppose?) of having it all: due dates for two different book-length projects and impending fatherhood. For me, it falls into the category of “be careful what you ask for ’cause you might get it.”

Oh, if I didn’t already have plenty of things to meet my computer portable storage needs, I’d be all over this. Anyway, for the rest of you who need a USB drive and who have an affection for all things Polynesian, check out these USB drives that look like Tikis.

St. Martin’s Press guy and all-around good computers and writing sort Nick Carbone sent me a piece from the subscription only version of The Chronicle of Higher Education called “Test Scores Do Not Predict Happiness” by Theodore A. O’Neill. I actually get the print version of the CHE (temporarily), so I should look this one up.

A lot of what O’Neill is talking about in this essay is the general complaints about the SAT and how it presents some huge problems for admissions offices (O’Neill is the dean of admissions at the University of Chicago). At the end of his essay, he writes:

Admissions officers could, of course, ask students to write for the
college application rather than for the SAT, could pose questions
interesting enough to capture the attention of smart kids and then
read the responses with care and sensitivity — but that takes time
and skill. We could sit and talk to students about their thoughts,
reading, lives, dreams, and whatever else they feel is important to an
understanding of who they are, but that takes time and skill.
Schoolteachers could teach and evaluate without relying on Advanced
Placement examinations and SAT-II’s to direct their teaching and
validate their successes, but that would take time and skill.

Even if the skill is available — and a lot of skillful and devoted
people work as teachers and admissions counselors — the time so
frequently is not.

Incidentally, if a place like the University of Chicago doesn’t have the resources to do what most people would consider to be “the right thing,” what chance does a place like EMU have?

Anyway, as troubling as all that might be, the thing that really got me in this piece is the reminder that the written part of the test will be written out by hand, and, as a result, penmanship is going to count, even if it is on the basic level of legibility or on some more hard to measure/impressionistic/unconscious level .

Let me tell ya, I am so lucky I don’t have to take this test.

Here is a “real and undoctored” version of my handwriting:

I will admit that I didn’t try to be especially neat when I wrote this, but I didn’t try to be messy either, and I do think this is a more or less “real” writing sample. When I got done reading the article that Nick sent me, I sat down with a pen and tried to write out a response. My first problem was actually using a pen– I much prefer to do my “writing” on a computer keyboard. But beyond that, here’s what I noticed:

• I used a pen on white unlined paper. I assume students taking the test will have to use the classic #2 pencils, which (for me, at least) would make it even more illegible.
• Writing this much took me about 15-20 minutes. I could have typed four times as much in the same amount of time.
• I couldn’t revise anything really, which really frustrated me.
• I think my handwriting (and again, this is pretty typical) “looks” dumb, which, in turn, makes me look dumb. Which is why I type.
• Oh yeah, these are all reactions based on writing something in a not very difficult situation– that is, I wasn’t taking a test in a room with a bunch of other people.

I guess what I’m saying is if I were in the same situation as perspective college students having to take this test, I’m not sure I could do it.

I wonder how many of the test developers would be willing to do it?

I’m sitting in Bombadill’s Coffee Shop in downtown Ypsi right now, working away. Or trying to work away. There are people talking all around me, there’s music playing in the background, the sun is coming in at an odd angle and making it difficult for me to see the computer screen, and the espresso machine is screaming away. And despite all this, all I can hear is this woman next to me eating soup and licking her fingers like a wild animal. Jeesh.