Author: Steve Krause

… if I could add item 14 to this list of 13 other tips on being creative from gapingvoid, I’d add “ignore lists on being creative.” Like this list, it can get you thinking, but ultimately, it can’t make you creative, just like wearing the right basketball shoes are not going to improve your jump shot.

Dang, I ought to read that Kairos news blog more often…

From this entry, I found this article “500 Books In Your Gadget Bag.” Haven’t had a chance to read it all yet, but it looks interesting. Here’s the opening paragraph:

The common wisdom is that eBooks will have a hard time for two reasons: bad reader devices and book junkies opting only for the hard stuff, the dead-tree form factor. But display technology, a sticking point in making attractive readers, has come a long way. And the idea that eBooks and books printed on paper can’t coexist peacefully is an almost Luddite belief. Steve Jobs doesn’t show up and take your CD deck when you buy an iPod – music and books on physical media remain, for some time to come. Still, bring up eBooks in a bookish crowd, and you’ve got conflict as contentious as any Manchester United/Arsenal match.

I stumbled across this while procrastinating– er, “pre-thinking,” that’s it– my grading for this evening. WebQuest, in the old days (the late 90’s), was a kind of interesting resource for using the web to teach, mostly K-12, and mostly for folks who weren’t doing things too complicated on the web. Like just about all education resources– especially “lesson-plan”-style materials– some of it was cool, some of it wasn’t.

Anyway, I hadn’t thought much about it one way or the other for years until I came across this entry about WebQuest, blogs, and wikis. I found this via this link at the Kairosnews blog. Yet another good potential link for the 516 class.

… yet potentially accurate.

Hmmm… Tastes like Chicken. Am I chicken? Am I a frog? Am I human? All unfamiliar meats taste like chicken, and that’s what I am, an unfamiliar meat. What Flavour Are You?

Apparently, there’s a science fiction book called The X-President which features a 109 year old version of Bill Clinton and a complicated plot involving time-travel. Go here to Steve “The Pinocchio Theory” Shaviro’s blog entry about it, of you want to read more. BTW Steve, welcome to Michigan. I’m not sure what is good or not about Detroit-city, but I like it well-enough over here in Ypsi-Arborland…

Answer: Nobody, technically.

As this article from Saturday’s paper put it, “No replacement yet for EMU president.” Technically, there isn’t an interim president or, well, anyone, currently running the show.

From my angle on things, not much has changed. I taught my classes, handed back essays, went to an interesting meeting (really!), etc. It wasn’t like the place had descended into chaos. Well, hadn’t descended further into chaos.

But the real danger here is the faculty is negotiating a contract right now. I will leave some of the other scuttle-butt of the process out of this, but there’s no president and Provost Schollaert isn’t exactly enjoying the respect of leadership at this stage. The faculty have called for him to resign (which I don’t really agree with– see earlier posts on this), and the board of regents has also not named him as the interim president, which would be a natural move since, as provost, he is basically the “senior VP” of the place. So, just who are we negotiating with?

Another kind of interesting tidbit is Schollaert sent around a letter to everyone on campus asking for unity in these troubled times. I don’t have the letter in front of me, but he said something along the lines of “we made mistakes” and “we all need to come together for the sake of our institution.” Well, unless he’s using the “royal we” there, I have to take issue with his pronoun choice. It wasn’t my idea to build that stupid house, to spend money out of accounts in a clearly inappropriate way, to send Kirkpatrick packing with over a half-million dollars. They made mistakes, and they are going to have to come up with a solution.

Schollaert is in a tough spot because the house probably wasn’t his idea, either. But I don’t really see how “we” at EMU can “pull together” until the folks responsible for this mess, the board of regents, step down. That’s the “they” that has to go.

See this entry from Jenny, “The Face of Coffee Jesus.”

I really need to get to bed because we’re leaving Iowa tomorrow between 4 and 5 am so we can get ready for school on Monday. But I just came across this Reuter’s news article, “Some Republicans defect to Kerry camp. It’s an interesting piece– I just hope it’s wide-spread.

BTW, I found this via the Kerry campaign blog. Neat site, though I’m assuming it is also an “edited” site. I suspect “Dittohead” posts will immediately be sacked, as they would be from my site, too.

I found a link to this via Johndan’s blog:

Early Visual Media. I don’t have time to look at this too much now, but it certainly looks like a fun site.

See this article from MSN Encarta, “Do You Write Like a Felon?” This is the sort of thing I might end up coming back to later on as I put together English 516, but I guess the other reason I’m linking to this is it strikes me as kind of strange that MSN has this article about handwriting analysis, a “science” that is pretty much in the same league as reading the bumps on one’s head.

Of course, I say that as someone who has pretty horrible handwriting.