Author: Steve Krause

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Just for the heck of it, I’ll give my two cents about Henry Louis Gates being arrested

Let me offer three important caveats:

  • I do not know Henry Louis “Skip” Gates nor am I that familiar with his work (though, obviously, I’ve heard of him as he is arguably one of the two or three most famous and influential African American scholars in the U.S. today);
  • I wasn’t there when Gates got arrested; and/or
  • My own bias is generally with Gates and Obama– that is, I do tend to think that if Gates were a white guy this wouldn’t have happened, I think that Gates was arrested mostly because he pissed the cop off, and, like our president, it would appear that the Cambridge Police handled this “stupidly.”

Having said all that, I think the one thing that I’ve seen missing from the popular press reports trying to analyze this story is about Gates’ pedigree as a very prestigious academic.  Gates might be the nicest guy on the face of the earth, but I’ve got to say that most very prestigious academics have a bit of a, um, “diva” complex.  So for me, it is very easy to believe that under the circumstances, Gates may have given the arresting officer a bit of ‘tude.  I can imgine something like this:

Officer: Sir, we have a complaint about a break-in at this address—

Gates: Do YOU know WHO I AM?!?  I’m the freakin’ Alphonse Fletcher University Professor at Harvard!!

Officer:  The who?

Gates: I’m the freakin’ Director of the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research!!

Officer: The what?

Gates:  You really don’t know who I am or why I’m important?!

Officer:  No, no sir, I don’t.

Gates:  You Neanderthal.  Racist pig.  What is WRONG with you?!

Officer:  Okay, okay, my friend, you have the right to remain silent….

(and scene)

I guess my point is that if you are an academic and you think you are “a big deal,” probably best to check that at the door when confronting law enforcement.  My free advice.

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Dimdim: Web conferencing

This is one of those things I need to think about playing with for my online teaching:  Dimdim.com seems to be pretty interesting software for collaborative video conferencing online, and there’s even an education/virtual classroom option. Now, it might not be all that smart/great; for example, I am concerned that the educational option promotes the fact that classroom size has now been increased from 40 to 50 (um, hurray?).  But to help with my own online teaching and/or to help my students collaborate on projects, it seems to me this might be a pretty handy tool for 328, 516, 444, or just about anything else I teach online.

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“Lost in the Clouds”

I don’t know if I’ll be including a unit on “cloud computing” per se in anything I teach in the near future, but I think Jonathan Zittrain’s “Lost in the Cloud” raises some really interesting and difficult questions about the down-side of everything being up online and off the desktop.  A useful  quote:

A hacker recently guessed the password to the personal e-mail account of a Twitter employee, and was thus able to extract the employee’s Google password. That in turn compromised a trove of Twitter’s corporate documents stored too conveniently in the cloud. Before, the bad guys usually needed to get their hands on people’s computers to see their secrets; in today’s cloud all you need is a password.

This might come up in 516 or 444, maybe even in the upcoming tech for teaching.

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Missouri et al trip recap

It’s funny because while I haven’t been here for the last week, I spent plenty of time online here, here, and here. In the real world, I was off on the every other year Krause family summer get together in Lake of the Ozarks, Missouri.  Here’s a set of pictures on Flickr; here’s a few highlights:

  • Spent the first night in St. Louis, where we enjoyed fried toasted ravioli and red sauce Italian food.  The next day, we went to the Arch (of course) and then City Museum, which I have to say is actually the “must see” attraction of the two, IMO.  There was some fun and funky stuff in St. Louis; I’m looking forward to going back when the CCCCs is there in few years.
  • My parents rented a house on the Lake of the Ozarks for the 10 adults and eight grandkids.  On the plus-side:  the house was pretty much big enough, pretty nice, had great views, and the water was accessible down many many stairs.  On the down-side:  it was down a winding road,  another winding road, a gravel road a gravel/dirt road, and finally a “holy shit, you want me to drive down that?!” gravel/dirt road.  Which meant it was about 35 minutes from the main road, which was where most of “civilization” was located.
  • The other down-side (which wasn’t exactly a surprise) was there was no easy internet access, which made teaching my online classes somewhat challenging for the week.  Surprisingly though, I think I pulled it off with a couple of trips to a Panera’s and the iPhone.  I did finally start playing around with iPhone internet tethering, which worked fantastic for me but which makes me paranoid.  I’m just worried I’m going to get some kind of huge charge added to my bill.
  • We had fun with the family (Will especially had fun playing with the cousins), the weather was much cooler and more reasonable than I was expecting, I got a chance to play golf a couple times, everyone but my father and me got a chance to go out on the water on a rented boat, had a lot of fun going to Ha Ha Tonka State Park, and we had some nice views of the lake.  Having said that, Lake of the Ozarks seems mostly a place to go and get on a boat, drink beer, and go “wooo!”  A little country/hillbilly-ish for my tastes, generally speaking.
  • Then it was off to Chicago.  Went out with Troy and Lisa on Friday, which was great though our effort to get into Frontera Grill was thwarted by a 2+ hour wait.  Maybe next time.  (BTW, fun fact I didn’t know until I visited his web site:  Rick Bayless did at least some PhD work in Anthropological Linguisitcs at U of M.  Go figure).  Instead, we went to Vong’s Thai Kitchen, which was quite nice.
  • Got up the next morning and had a run/walk through Millennium Park as I went and picked up breakfast stuff for Will and Annette.  It was one of those mornings that made me think living in Chicago would be pretty cool.
  • Then onto the Museum of Science and Industry, mainly for Harry Potter:  The Exhibition.  I’d like to tell you to check out the pictures I took, but there was a definite NO PHOTOGRAPHY rule.  Despite that, it was a pretty cool collection of costumes and props and set stuff from the movie, probably more for the “hard core” fan (like my wife and son), but still enjoyable for the likes of me.  One of the tour dudes there told us that the movie makers working on something actually came back to get something from the exhibit, I guess to work on the current film.  The only down-side was we once again were not able to see the coal mine exhibit– or maybe a better way of putting it is we weren’t willing to wait in line for an hour or more.  Again, next time.
  • Managed to spend some time getting lost in some of the less desirable neighborhoods on the southside and near the Chicago Skyway Bridge, got stuck in traffic in Gary, etc.

All in all, a good trip.  Now it’s a couple weeks of “normalness” at home before the Traverse City experience.

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Fancy Fast Food

For the amount of work that these folks put into their Fancy Fast Food, they could make actual fancy food. But I have to admire the artistry of making a chow mein out of a Domino’s pizza.

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The square-foot gardening continues

Square foot garden It’s been a pretty busy spring and summer this year, but we’ve still had time to have a fine and successful square-foot garden experiment on the side of the house. Back in mid-April, it was pretty much just a plot with dirt.  Now here we are in mid-July, and the garden is going mad.  Here’s a link to the set so far; a few highlights:

  • The peas Will and I planted from seed back in late April/early May have come and gone– we got two good meals worth of stir-fried snow peas (with other things, of course).
  • The lettuce was great too; I think we must have gotten at least a dozen salads out of that. We’re about to leave town tomorrow, but I think that Will and I are going to plant a mix of green beans and carrots after we get back.
  • And those tomato plants are freakin’ huge! We’ll see what the actual tomatoes look like though.
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“A Facebook teaching moment”

In the NY Times Ethicist column “A Facebook teaching moment,” Randy Cohen responds to a query about an eighth grade teacher who has a Facebook account where she friends students and where she sees things about under-age drinking, drug use, and school cheating. He suggests that the teacher ought to make students aware that she is aware of their bad behavior and about the less than private nature of Facebook:

Strictly speaking, when these students gave her access to their Facebook pages, they waived their right to privacy. But that’s not how many kids see it. To them, Facebook and the like occupy some weird twilight zone between public and private information, rather like a diary left on the kitchen table. That a photo of drunken antics might thwart a chance at a job or a scholarship is not something all kids seriously consider. This teacher can get them to think about that.

I generally agree with this advice, though it seems to me that since these students are eighth graders, the teacher might a) have a different obligation to report bad behavior to the proper authorities, and b) not want to be Facebook friends with her students. It’s one thing for me to friend my college-aged and legal adult students; it’s quite another to friend tweens.

I also think it’s worth mentioning/remembering that this lack of privacy of Facebook is a two-way street, and some of the most explosive Facebook problems in K-12 schools in the last year or so have involved teachers who forgot that their Facebook accounts were public spaces.

This might be good for 516 in the winter term.

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“We are all writers now”

The ever-readerly Nick Carbone posted this link to some of the usual mailing lists:  “We are all writers now,” in More Intelligent Life and by Anne Trubek. It’s a nice piece, especially in response to that old “we’re going th hell in a handbasket with writing and reading because of these dang computers.”  Here’s a quote:

Go back 20, 30 years and you will find all of us doing more talking than writing. We rued literacy levels and worried over whether all this phone-yakking and television-watching spelled the end of writing.

Few make that claim today. I would hazard that, with more than 200m people on Facebook and even more with home internet access, we are all writing more than we would have ten years ago. Those who would never write letters (too slow and anachronistic) or postcards (too twee) now send missives with abandon, from long thoughtful memos to brief and clever quips about evening plans. And if we subscribe to the theory that the most effective way to improve one’s writing is by practicing—by writing more, and ideally for an audience—then our writing skills must be getting better.

BTW, I wish there was an easy way for me to post the same post to two or three different blogs…. Anyway, this one will come in handy for things like 516 for sure.