Author: Steve Krause

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A Vegas prelude trip

In my experience, when I’ve told people that Annette and I are going to Las Vegas, there are two basic reactions. On the one hand, there’s “Oooh, where are you staying? You should go and see such and such,” and so forth. On the other hand, there’s “Oooh, why in the heck would you do that? Las Vegas is like a level of hell,” and so forth. There isn’t that much in-between.

Obviously, we’re in the first camp, though not because we are that interested in gambling. We went about eight years ago, and I think between the two of us, we lost $150. What Las Vegas was good for then (and hopefully will be good for this time around) is just gawking at all of the excess, all the extremes that are America. Las Vegas is the kind of town where it is perfectly acceptable to be walking down the strip at 3 am in a tuxedo or in your pajamas, where you can spend pretty much as much or as little as you want, where you can buy a Prada purse, look at a pretty convincing fake Eiffel tower, and get handed flyers for porn all in the same block.

But as a prelude to Vegas, we first stopped in Chicago and then Iowa. Chicago was an impromptu event. We ended up with a Priceline deal at the Hyatt Regency on Wacker, which was quite nice. I think we ended up paying more money for parking and a bar tab with our friends Troy and Lisa than we did on the actual room. But before we went out with Troy and Lisa, who I’ve known for like 25 or 30 years and who have given us a lot of good Vegas travel advice, Annette and Will and I went to the Navy Pier. It was pretty good people-watching, walking around, festive and park-like atmosphere. We ended up going through a maze (Will’s idea) that was over-priced but kinda fun, and a stained glass museum that was surprisingly good.  Okay touristy fun in beautiful summer weather.

Now we’re in Iowa with the Krause grandparents. While Annette and I are in Vegas, Will is going to be staying for the biannual “kid camp,”where the grandparents get lots of quality time with the kiddies. He’ll have fun, though sometimes Will’s only child-ness kicks in on visits like this.

Anyway, I was originally planning for a “computer blackout” period during this trip, but since I am teaching an online class right now, those plans have changed.  Just as well; it’ll give me a chance to post some pictures and such from the road.

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“The Trolls Among Us”

From The New York Times coming out this Sunday, “The Trolls Among Us.” I don’t have time to read it too much right now– I’m getting ready to go to Vegas, which my millions of readers will read about soon– but maybe I’ll pick up a copy of the NYT on Sunday for a change of pace. It looks like potential reading for a number of the classes I teach.

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Farewell, web page assignment

I am trying to get my ducks in a row for English 328 for the fall, a term that will see a couple of “firsts” and/or “haven’t done that in a long time” sort of milestones for me. It will be the first time in a long time where I have taught a “full load” because I have no administrative/quasi-administrative obligations next year. It will be the first time in three or so years (not counting the year I was both the writing program coordinator and the WPA) in which I will teach all on campus– no online courses for me in the fall.

And, and I say this with some sadness, it will be the first time since I started teaching English 328 ten years ago where I will not be including some kind of “make your own simple web page” assignment.

There’s basically three reasons why I decided to axe this assignment.

First, I really wanted to include a simple video/movie assignment in the class and something had to go. I think the “invent your own writing technology” (where students have to make things and reflect on some of the theories of writing as a technology readings from people like Ong and Baron and the like) is really fundamental to the whole idea of the course, that writing is a technology and the technologies we use to write has a direct impact on what/how/why we write. I think the “style project” (where students read, compare, analyze, and write about a couple of style manuals, my current choices being Strunk and White and Williams’ Style: Toward in Clarity and Grace) because I think it’s critical that students in this advanced writing course think about and pay very close attention to their writing in this nitty-gritty sort of way. In theory, most of the people who take English 328 are wanting to be some flavor of professional writer (journalist, PR person, tech writer, etc.) or a high school teacher. It seems to me that those people ought to have some critical awareness of “the rules.” And I didn’t want to give up on the comic assignment because it’s still comparatively new to me, it’s a great way to introduce the connection between “the visual” and text, and it will serve as a great gateway to a motion picture/multimedia project. So in an odd way, the web site became kind of the odd man out.

Second, there’s a lot of other ways nowadays to publish stuff on the web and a lot of other ways to incorporate a set of “technology literacy skills” into a class like English 328– Google docs and various related tools, blogger, flickr, wiki software, chat software, audio tools, YouTube, etc., etc.  All this “web 2.0” stuff, whatever that means.  And a pretty good argument could be made that for most students in English 328, students who tend not to keep maintaining a web site after the class is over, these other writing and literacy tools are a whole lot more useful than learning how to make and revise a simple web site.

And third– oh, I don’t know, I guess it’s just not that relevant anymore.  Static web sites are still useful– I’m in the process of creating a new one here for my English 328 materials—  but in an age of blogging tools, facebook, linkedin, myspace, etc., etc., does it really matter if someone has something like a “homepage” anymore?  I abandoned that assignment in English 444:  Writing for the World Wide Web last term and instead had students convert/re-purpose a print text to the web, and I think that was a more useful and better assignment.

This might not work out.  I think a pretty compelling argument can be made that basic HTML and basic CSS are still fundamental building blocks to all things web and web 2.0-oriented.  I might be doing students a disservice by skipping these details.  But after 10 years– more than that, if you count the times I was teaching web page authoring before EMU– I think it’s time to give this one a rest.

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Tarantino’s Mind

I came across this via Johndan’s blog. If you are a fan of Quentin Tarantino and are willing to work your way through the subtitles (it was a film done in Brazil), it is well worth 15 minutes.

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“The Literacy Debate,” NYTimes style

My colleague Cheryl sent me this article, “Literacy Debate: Online, R U Really Reading?” from the Sunday New York Times book section. It figures; I contemplated getting the NYT yesterday too, but decided to try and fix a broken kitchen drawer instead (with some success, I might add).

The story promises to be one part of a series “The future of reading: digital versus print.” That’s just great. What will come next? “The future of sandwiches: peanut butter versus jelly.” Or “The future of music: rock versus roll.”

It’s an interesting and very teachable article as it keeps see-sawing back and forth between the idea that yes, children (of all ages, I guess, because the group they are talking about here are teenagers, mostly) need to read books to become better readers and thus smarter/better people, versus reading stuff online really does count as reading and it is a type of literacy skill that is both different from traditional book reading and that is important to master. To me, they kind of bury on page four the key point: “Even those who are most concerned about the preservation of books acknowledge that children need a range of reading experiences. ‘Some of it is the informal reading they get in e-mails or on Web sites,’ said Gay Ivey, a professor at James Madison University who focuses on adolescent literacy. ‘I think they need it all.'”

I realize that there has to be a debate/controversy created to sell some papers here, but the idea that reading is somehow an “either-or” affair is ridiculous. And every time that someone says “the kids today don’t read books like they used to,” I always respond with two words: Harry Potter, a reading phenomenon unlike anything that existed when I was a kid.

Incidentally, the picture in the article of the kids looking at laptops and the parents looking at newspapers/magazines is sort of what it looks like around our household. Only around here, the TV is on too, and all three of us are looking at laptops typically.

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TalkShoe

I’m getting ready to get out of the house to play golf today (oh, the burdens I must carry), but I stumbled across this, TalkShoe, which promises to be a community podcasting system.  And it looks like it is one that can work with a cell phone, which would be very cool.  I’m rethinking of ways to revamp 328 with different web 2.0 -type technologies, and this seems like it might be a good one.

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Oh, the nearly random things the internets brings

Via boing-boing, I read this story about how the (morning?) news anchors of the Las Vegas Fox network have fake/plastic cups of McDonalds chilled coffee sitting in front of them. My initial thoughts were of course: it’s on Fox, and it’s in Vegas. It all adds up.

And then, just following a couple more links, I stumbled across this, Dickipedia: A Wiki of Dicks. Pretty good junior high humor. Here’s the opening paragraphs on the entry about Simon Cowell:

Simon Phillip Cowell (born 7 October 1959) is a British record executive, television producer, “author,” celebrity talent judge, and a dick.

Through the creation of television programs such as American Idol, Pop Idol, and Britain’s Got Talent, he has managed to force both his abrasive personality and the abrasive personalities of a number of mediocre “artists” into homes across the world. Uniquely, while many celebrities became popular despite being dicks, Cowell became a celebrity because he is a dick.

It isn’t a “real” wiki in that you can’t just edit anything, but it still provided me with almost five minutes of entertainment, and what more can we ask from this communication network?

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I’m not that Steven Krause

According to Wikipedia, Steven Krause is “the vocalist of the US hardcore band From Behind The Pictures Eyes. Well known for his time spent in the Detroit industrial/metal act Inflextion and industrial/hardcore juggernaut, Too Many Gods, Steven Krause is one of the more famed local Detroit musicians of the early 21st century.”  But that’s not me.

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Adeona: free and open source laptop security program

This looks pretty cool: Adeona, which is a free and open source security software for tracking a laptop. Follow the link for the full explanation of the software, but besides the fact that the price is very right, this is my favorite feature: “The Mac OS X version also has an option to capture pictures of the laptop user or thief using the built-in iSight camera and the freeware tool isightcapture.” So you can take a picture of the thief. That is almost cool enough for me to see if I can get a laptop stolen and then track the bad guy.

Almost.

Like I said, I haven’t tried this yet and it does look like it might be a half-step beyond the abilities of some basic users, but it looks very promising.