Category: Scholarship

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Laptops in every, ah, lap

Via BBC News comes this story, “US school swaps books for bytes.” I think I had a link/discussion about this same Arizona school a few months ago, but it would appear that now things are actually happening at this school.

A couple of interesting quotes; the first one answers the “either computers or books” issue, at least from the point of view of a start-up budget for a high school:

Providing all the pupils with Apple iBooks did not dent the school’s budget as much as might be expected. But part of that is down to the school having been newly built.

The money that was budgeted to buy text books, which was about $500 a student, was spent instead on the laptops.

“Our laptops cost is about $800 per pupil. Our net cost is probably $100 to $200 more than if we had used text books,” he [Calvin Baker, chief superintendent of the Vail School district] says.

By giving all the students a laptop computer, the school has done away with computer laboratories too.

Baker is also quoted in this article as saying that the school is not “book free”– there’s a library, for example– but most of the content students work with in classes are delivered via these laptops.

Putting aside the sort of Sophie’s Choice method of financing these laptops, that last line, that a laptop on every student’s desk (and, since it’s mobile, in every student’s backpack and in every student’s house) has replaced computer labs, is really something that appeals to me. We’ve been experiencing some, ah, “technical challenges” with the support people as of late, which just underscores the ongoing problem an underfunded university like EMU has with technology. I’m not saying that a laptop program would solve everything; in fact, I think you could make a pretty good argument that all a laptop program at the college-level does is shift the burden of who has to pay for and maintain the hardware. But if we went this route, students wouldn’t be in a situation where they were learning how to do something on a computer they aren’t likely to use much, we could have computer labs which had higher-end hardware and software (for example, a multimedia lab), and the tech support people could focus on the keeping these smaller labs and the network running. And I think it would do a lot to help “technlogical literacy” on the whole at EMU.

In a way though, I think the idea that every student will have a laptop is kind of inevitable, plan or no plan, since more and more students are showing up with laptops all on their own. It’s easy to imagine a time four or five years from now where my students ignore the computers in the lab in favor of their own laptops, and that would be fine with me.

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Turnitin Turn-Ons?

Rebecca Moore “Schenectady Synecdoche” Howard, who has published quite a bit on issues having to do with plagiarism, tells the story of using Turnitin.com for the first time. As she explains, it turns out that she largely plagiarized herself.

We have a site license for Turnitin.com at EMU, and there has been some controversy about its use– the usual issues having to do with the “policing” function, ownership of the text, etc. I have used Turnitin.com a grand total of one time, and I used it to help me vet a couple of student essays I am (hopefully) including in my textbook as examples. These were already good essays and these students were long done with my class, so it wasn’t me trying to play policeman. I just needed to go through both essays to make sure everything was fine.

Now, maybe it was because I was working with some strong examples, but I found Turnitin pretty useless. I mean, all it did was highlight parts of the essays where the students include quotes. Sorta. Big deal.

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Wayne Booth, RIP

I just learned from a post on the WPA-L mailing list that Wayne Booth passed away yesterday. According to the Wikipedia entry on him I link to above, he was 84, and according to the discussion on WPA-L, he had Alzheimer’s.

I have kind of have a soft-spot for Booth’s work because one of my first “big” projects as a Ph.D. student a dozen years ago now was to give a presentation on Booth’s work in a rhetorical theory class. I hadn’t read much of his work before that assignment, but I ended up reading quite a bit for that class spiel. I especially remember a book he wrote called The Company We Keep, which I remember being a particularly readable and humane alternative to some of the theory I was trying to digest. And I am hoping to soon get on with reading Booth’s last book, The Rhetoric of Rhetoric.

Thanks for the inspiration and fine words, Dr. Booth.

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"Authors are saps" about Google

Via boing-boing this monring, I found an editorial by boing-boing co-editor Xeni Jardin in the LA Times titled “You Authors are Saps to Resist Googling.” The particular authors/saps in question are members of the Authors Guild, which is a group that represents author (about 8,000, according to Jardin). BTW, if you go to the Authors Guild web site, you can see plenty of links about why they are fightin’ mad at Google.

I think Jardin is totally right for at least three reasons. First, Google’s plan isn’t to show an entire book as the result of a search; rather, they’re just going to show a portion of the book relevant to a search. It isn’t going to be possible (apparently) to just get the whole book.

Second, the VAST majority of writers/authors that I know really want readers to read their writing; they aren’t as concerned with how many books they can (or really, can’t sell). Writers write for a lot of reasons, but one of the reasons I write is because I like the attention, and I for one have gotten a lot more attention from things I’ve published on the web than I anything I have published in traditional print.

Third, putting information about books online– including big chunks of content– helps sell them. As Jardin writes:

Perhaps the Authors Guild members would prefer that search companies pay them for the right to build book search services. If Google has its way, their logic goes, we’ll lose control over who can copy our work, and we’ll lose sales. But Internet history proves the opposite is true. Any product that is more easily found online can be more easily sold.

Amazon.com’s “look inside” feature works similarly. And, surprise, the Authors Guild has squabbled with it too.

Yep. Saps.

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Cool use of Screencasting (and my own Teaching Online adventures continue)

Via Collin’s blog comes this link to Will at Weblogg-ed about giving student feedback via a screencast. For the time-being, I really just want to link to this so I can come back to it later when I start working more earnestly on my CCCCs presentation. But I guess I’ve got two thoughts for now:

  • I’m not sure I like the idea of screencasting for each student’s essay, but it’s an interesting demonstration.
  • Personally, I’m having enough problems/”challenges” just keeping up on the “basics” for my online class. I’ve whined about this before, so I’m not going to whine about it now, but I guess what I’m getting at/wondering about is the tradeoff between doing things like screencasting or podcasting versus the time it takes to make screencasts and podcasts, not to mention the learning curve.
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U of M dentists beat me to my podcasting idea (but not really)

The Ann Arbor News ran a story today in the business section (of all places) titled “iPods help drill U-M students dentists: Lecture ‘podcasts’ now available.” Drill students– get it? get it? Ah, that dental humor….

Actually, this isn’t really what I’m trying to attempt with including audio in my online class, at least not exactly. I’m not even completely sure I’m doing what would be called “podcasting” because I haven’t quite figured out that part of the technology out yet, particularly the RSS stuff. I mean, I know that blogger has an audioblogging feature that is stupid easy to use: just record a message with them with a phone. The sound quality isn’t fantastic, but it is passable and I think I can set that up with RSS, but I want to do something more sophisticated than that.

Of course, the concern/worry I have is that if I build some sort of podcast outside of the class shell, I’m not convinced that my students will use it. And furthermore, I don’t know if I really need to build it outside fo the class eCollege software. As I think I mentioned earlier, I can record sound files with my iPod and a Belkin microphone, save these things as mp3s, and then simply upload them to the eCollege site. They aren’t “podcasts” in the purest sense, but hey, who cares? If they help…

… which brings me back ot the dentists. Basically, they are doing some podcasting of lectures at the U of M dental school, and you can even get them through iTunes (no, I’m not going to try to find a link to them….) The dean of the college is behind it– he says in the article that he’s on his fifth iPod.

But the thing that I thought was interesting for my purposes was this:

[Jared Van Ittersum, who was credited with heading the podcasting concept at U-M] said podcasting lectures evolved from a similar effort at the U-M Medical School, which provides low-resolution video of professors’ lectures for students to download from the Web.

But given the prevalence of the music players among students, podcasting emerged as a more mobile medium, said Trek Glowacki, an employee at the dental school’s informatics department and a student at U-M’s School of Information. Glowacki led the pilot study into whether students preferred podcasting to video. He found most picked the pod, which also involved far fewer university staff hours to deliver.

This interests me for a variety of different reasons, but besides the idea that the technology of the podcast is easier and more mobile for students, I think it is also considerably easier and more mobile for instructors as well. I could record and broadcast video of myself with eCollege, but even with the support I would get from Continuing Education at EMU to do this, it would still be an enormous pain in the ass. I mean, I’d have to go to a studio someplace, they’d have to cut the video together (or I’d have to do it, and that’d be a totally different learning curve), it would take a long time for students to download, etc., etc. Making and delievering a 10 minute mp3 file (albeit a not great sounding one) takes me a total of 20 minutes: 10 for the recording and 10 with the futzing. Not counting-retakes, of course.

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(A slightly belated) welcome to the CCC Online

I meant to post about this earlier in the week, but better late than never: welcome to town, the new CCC Online! I certainly think it’s the right idea and direction for the CCCCs. My copy of the paper version of the journal arrived yesterday (quite a bit fatter than usual too, in part because of the inclusion of Forum, which is a newsletters for non-tenure-track teachers and faculty in composition), and I guess it makes me wonder when College Composition and Communication (the paper journal) and the CCC Online will become one entity.

This might be kind of naive or it might be kind of obvious, but it just seems inevitable to me that academic journals like the CCCs will eventually not be published on paper anymore. I don’t mean this as some pronouncement of the “end of print,” nor do I think that the codex is going to vanish anytime soon. Books are just too convenient of a technology, especially for things like trade books and novels and such. I do think academic book publishers– especially the smaller ones –would be wise to investigate various “print on demand” technologies that make it cost effective to publish a single book, which would thus allow these presses to take on projects that are intellectually important but “impractical” from a sales and marketing point of view. Though this is a slightly different rant.

But I think academic journals are different. I don’t know if I am a typical reader of academic journals or not, but I subscribe to only one (the CCCs) and I do not read that journal all the way through (though, as part of my “new school year resolutions,” I intend to take the time to actually read some of the current scholarship in my field). I am more likely to browse online journals like Kairos, but the way that I usually engage with academic journals is through my research with various electronic search tools– the MLA Bibliography, WilsonSelect, etc. With this research, I do not go and look to read a journal per se; I look to read the article in that journal. Furthermore, if I can find that article electronically (and if it’s a PDF, even better!), then I probably wouldn’t even touch the actual periodical.

So, assuming my way of using periodicals is not too far off from the norm, why not just publish these things electronically? The advantages to web-based academic journals just seem so obvious to me that I don’t understand why paper periodicals haven’t gone to the web. I mean, electronic journals would save a lot of money (because you eliminate the costs of printing, mailing, and storing the paper), they are a lot more flexible (want to include color images with your essay? sound? video? etc.? go ahead!), potentially more interactive (which is what the CCC Online is after, I think), and a lot more accessible.

Without the restraints of print, journals could also eliminate things like maximum page lengths, they wouldn’t need to think in terms of volumes and issue numbers, and they could be a lot more nimble when it comes to bringing things out to readers (though in my experience with electronic journals, both as a writer and as a reviewer of articles, just because they can publish stuff more quickly doesn’t mean they will).

So it just seems to me that merging of College Composition and Communication (the paper publication) and of the CCC Online (the web site) is kind of inevitable. What will be interesting to see how and when we get to that place.

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Getting out of NOLA

From the September 16 CHE comes this narrative by Bill Lavender, who runs a creative writing program at the University of New Orleans. Pretty scary stuff; I’m glad that he and his girlfriend got out of there, and I of course wish him and all the folks in NOLA and all academic-types (happy and otherwise) good luck and a speedy return.