Writer, Professor, and Everything Else
This falls into the category of perhaps not pc and/or of the typical liberalness that characterizes all things stevendkrause.com. But I thought it was funny:
Obama Win Causes Obsessive Supporters To Realize How Empty Their Lives Are
I’m off to find another cause right now, actually….
Via Will Richardson, I came across this NYTimes article/blog/whatever, “Mourning Old Media’s Decline.” It’s an interesting article about the ongoing implosion of old media/traditional newspapers. My wife and I were just talking the other day about canceling our paper subscription to the Ann Arbor News; what’s the point if I’m either going to not read it at all and/or read it online?
Anyway, this is an article that might work well for 444, where I usually have some discussion/unit/readings about “citizen journalism.” But I also post about this because I think that Will has it slightly wrong, when he writes:
The problem for us is that we’re still teaching like our kids are going to be reading those edited, linear, well-written newspapers when the reality is they’re not. And the bigger problem is that, by and large, we still don’t know enough about the “new” media world in our personal practice to push those conversations about change in any meaningful way.
We better figure it out pretty quickly, or we’ll be mourning much more than old media…
These are important warnings, but I have to say that I think that my colleagues in journalism (and I teach in a somewhat unusual English department in that journalism is housed here) are well-aware of this, and I think that there teaching has been moving in that direction. I’m not completely privy to the discussions that happen among that group, and I do know there is a tension between, um, “old school” and “new school” folks. That being said, there’s lots of technological awareness, abilities, and pedagogy in these kinds of classes.
And the thing is that while the medium itself is changing– as is the definition of what constitutes an “expert” or a “journalist”– the basic literacy and research skills of what we train in students in journalism is not. We still have lots and lots of students in our journalism program (not to mention PR and our writing majors), and, as far as I can tell, these students still end up getting jobs. It’s just that the paper pulp and the ink is gone.
I got this via Mark Maynard’s blog– and look, a local too (well, greater metro Detroit, that is):
Via Alex Halavais’ blog feed, I came across this article on the Financial Times web site, “Net prophets,” which is a review article of three different books out/coming out about search engines, including Halavais’ forthcoming book.
It is the sort of thing that would be good to include for English 516, but it’s on my mind this morning in my waning “Blogs as Writerly Spaces” project and the chapter/part on rhetorical situation. Which is itself on my mind since that was the topic (more or less) from last night’s section of English 505. I haven’t quite figured it out yet, but I it seems to me that search engines throw a wrench into the role of audience in rhetorical situation, no matter how firmly (Bitzer) of fuzzily (Bisecker ala Derrida) you define “audience” or any other constituent in situations.
I think that Jenny Edbauer is on to something with “Unframing Models of Public Distribution: From Rhetorical Situation to Rhetorical Ecologies,” that isn’t quite talking about the phenomenon of search-fueled audiences and spikes in audiences as a result of searches– as I experienced quite personally with the EMU faculty strike a few years ago.
Anyway, this is all the BAWS thinking I get today. Too much voting, too much grading, and (hopefully) too much celebrating, more or less in that order.
This is just freakin’ unbelievable: apparently, Sarah Palin took a crank phone call from some radio DJs in Montreal who pretended to be the president of France. Here’s a quote from the article “Palin Punk’d by Prank Call:”
ABC News David Wright, Alyssa Litoff, and Bret Hovell report: Foreign relations never were her strong suit, so perhaps it’s understandable that Republican vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin actually appeared to believe that French President Nicholas Sarkozy would call her out of the blue to talk about “unting” and “Joe le plumber.”
Perhaps her first hint that it was actually a crank call should have been “Sarkozy’s” admission that “from my ‘ouse, I can see Belgium.”
Just remember, would-be McCain supporters: the woman who would be a heartbeat away from the most powerful position in the free world would also probably take your call about your refrigerator running or Prince Albert in a can. God help us all on Tuesday.
BTW, here’s a YouTube video with the audio of the phone call:
We had an absolutely beautiful night for Halloween this year– maybe in the fifties, clear skies, no wind, etc. And as a result, we had lots and lots of trick and/or treaters. Ours is a neighborhood that always gets a lot of trick and/or treaters, and this year we ended up giving away about 750 pieces of candy. Cheap candy, I should point out– we get big bulk bags from Costco of Tootsie Rolls, Smarties, Laffy Taffy, etc.
I felt kind of bad. Andre and Dickish McBastard (et al) stopped by and tried trick and/or treating for beer, and I balked. I only had a couple left, guys. I owe you a couple at the Corner or something like that.
As usual, Will dressed as a knight– well, sort of, since his costume was kind of incomplete, but he was unwilling to wear a hat. As usual, Annette accompanied Will on his candy rounds while I passed out candy. This year, I dressed up as Steve from Blue’s Clues (years and years ago, when Will went trick and/or treating as Blue from Blue’s Clues, I went through a tremendous amount of work to get the perfect shirt), and several small children (and Andre and Stephanie) recognized me as “Steve.”
Interestingly, Will got to a point where he decided it was more fun to give out candy than to actually trick and/or treat himself. So Will sat in the chair I was in for much of the night in the front yard (like I said, it was a beautiful night) and lorded over the candy while Annette and I sat on the stoop and drank wine. An excellent Halloween indeed.
By the way, I received many compliments on my Obama pumpkin. I’m going to take this as a good sign for Tuesday. The pumpkin on the right is one that Will carved at school with his “senior buddies,” which is a program at Greenhills that pairs up sixth graders with 12th graders for various activities, like carving pumpkins. This is a pumpkin eating a pumpkin, which was Will’s idea and one that got from a FoodTV show we were watching the other night.
Oh, and the pumpkins in my new header are here:
Three or four people have now sent me this:
I’m not sure if I am getting this because people are afraid I won’t vote, they know I would appreciate both the humor and the technology, if I am the easy butt of jokes, or some combination of all of the above. But don’t worry; I’ll do my part on Tuesday.
I’ve seen this elsewhere in the blogosphere and on Facebook, but I post it here because it took place in my hometown of Cedar Falls, Iowa: “Pre-emptive ejection: Audience members removed at McCain rally in Cedar Falls.” Basically, McCain held a rally in Cedar Falls on the campus of the University of Northern Iowa, and before the event began, UNI security kicked out four or five people who apparently didn’t “look right” and/or who McCain staffers thought might be protesters.
By not “look right,” I believe the McCain people were thinking “under 30.” Because why would there be anyone younger than that hanging around a college campus?
There is a bit more at Talking Points Memo, including a link to some (kind of bad quality) video about the students asked to leave:
First off, I don’t really understand why McCain was in Iowa (every election map I’ve seen that has it solid blue and has had it that way for a while now), and I don’t understand why anyone would want to vote for someone to be president who thinks it is perfectly acceptable in this country to simply kick people out because they didn’t “look right.”
But beyond the McCain issues, why in the heck would the University of Northern Iowa rent a public facility to the campaign and then say they can let in/kick out whoever they want? Shouldn’t there be some kind of conditions tied to this, something along the lines of “you can limit the number of people, but you can’t kick people out because they look funny.” I mean, it would have been flat-out illegal to kick out people because they were women or Mexican-American or something like that; why isn’t this against the law too? Why would the UNI police actually follow through on that?
This is an article I might include for ENGL 516 in the winter: from Inside Higher Ed, “Taking Facebook Back to Campus.” This isn’t exactly an earth-shattering article, but a lot of my students last year in 516 still thought of Facebook and MySpace as a place where teenagers exchange pictures of themselves drinking and/or having sex, and where having a profile of your own is akin to going to an orgy. Not all of my students, of course– plenty of them (maybe a majority of them?) already had some kind of profile on one of these accounts of their own. But there was enough of a vocal and concerned minority of students with this view that anything I can share with the message “no really, Facebook is actually useful, at least potentially” is probably a good thing.
