Category: Teaching

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Summer "break" and just past half-way in my online class

There are two articles in Inside Higher Ed right now– this one and this one— about the academic’s life during the summer. Frankly, I don’t really relate to either one of them, but feel free to read if you’d like.

For me, summer (or really, at EMU, we call this “spring” and then “summer”– that is, there are usually two 7.5 week terms between the fall and winter semesters) is kind of the worst of times, and the best of times. The bad stuff first: whenever I talk with my non-academic-type parents about being done with the winter term, they always assume that I am on “vacation” from the last day of school in April until the first day in late August or early September. Hardly.

Technically, the faculty contract does allow for this kind of approach– that is, technically, I could just disappear completely for four or so months. But practically speaking, this never happens. Inevitably, there are various meetings, and this spring/summer, since I have taken over as the “writing program coordinator,” I am spending a fair amount of time doing various paperwork things and responding to emails from and meeting with future (hopefully) graduate students. I also have a couple of scholarly projects going on, a workshop on blogging coming up (more on that tomorrow or so), some projects having to do with writing.emich.edu, etc.

And then there’s teaching. Basically, I cannot afford to “take the summer off” from teaching, because of a combination of needing the money and the money for teaching at EMU in the summer being too good to refuse. Normally, summer teaching at EMU means working for 7.5 weeks, either the spring or the summer terms, which means that I’d still be “free” for about 8 weeks. But as loyal readers will recall, I worked out a deal where I am teaching an online class this spring/summer for 12 weeks instead of the usual 7.5 weeks. The verdict is still out and there are some “complicating issues” with this particular group of students, but I think that I actually might prefer “sucking it up” and teaching online in the usual 7.5 weeks. My wife is teaching in the regular 7.5 week term and the fact that she only has three class meetings to go has me envious.

But there are the “good times,” too. Work-wise, things are more quiet right now. Teaching only online is good, albeit a bit discombobulating since it makes that line between “work” and “life” even more fuzzy. I do get to play golf about once a week or so, though my game has been quite bad lately. The weather in Michigan this time of year is beautiful. And so forth….

Enough of that though; time to get back to work!

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Yet another Facebook article

This one in Inside Higher Ed, titled “The Many Faces of Facebook.” I just skimmed it, but it looks like it’s talking about the different ways that different institutions deal with Facebook, it has a bunch of links to various “Facebook event stories” (e.g., how the Secret Service investigated some kid because of GW Bush assissination attempt references made in Facebook), and it might make for good reading in a class next year. Other than that, same old, same old. And it reminds me to check in on my Facebook stuff….

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Online Book Reviews, Blogger Conventions: two links for later…

Both of these are links I’m interested in keeping track of for teaching (I can easily imagine them as a reading (or really, listening) assignment for Writing for the World Wide Web or my graduate course in computers and writing:

  • “Upon Further Review,” which is an NPR Morning Edition Sunday story about how the new book The Stolen Child has become very popular not as the result of professional reviews but because of “amateur” critics on amazon.com. Nice and crabby comments from “professional” critics about how the amateurs can’t possibly get it right.
  • “Lefty Bloggers Assemble in Las Vegas,” also on NPR Morning Edition Sunday. I had read about this in the NYT a couple weeks ago (and still have that article kicking around someplace), but this is a nice addition to the coverage of the Daily KOS convention. The question is if you put a bunch of bloggers into a room together, would they actually talk to each other? Or just tyle with/at each other?
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"Datamining" with Google advice

Here are a couple of sites I will want to come back to later when putting together some various syllabi: “Google Guide: Using Search Operators” and this entry from a blog called CyberWyre, “Data Mining on the Internet with Google.” They both outline a lot of special search operators that you can use with Google that I had certainly not heard of before.

BTW, I came across this site via the del.icio.us/popular page, which has become a part of my morning coffee reading. It took me a while to figure out the point of a service like del.icio.us, but now I’m all for it. I think I need to start playing around with this digg thing next…

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The rise of YouTube…

I was actually looking for something else, but I came across this page on NPR’s web about “Viral Video and the Rise of YouTube.” This is one of those things I’ll need to come back to later when I start planning English 516 for the winter…. Well, that and maybe the next round of the Writing for the World Wide Web class, too.

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"Pre-Writing" techniques gone mad!

Actually, that’s just a kind of catchy headline. But I stumbled this morning across this list of “Creativity Techniques,” which is at a wiki site for a group called “mycoted,” which is “dedicated to improving Creativity and Innovation for solving problems woldwide.” Pretty interesting; I haven’t looked at it too closely yet, but essentially, this list looks like variations on that old chesnut of the rhetorical canon, “invention.”

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Worldmapper: a potentially cool "visual rhetoric" tool

For me– and maybe this is because I have an overly simple understanding of the concept of “visual rhetoric,” especially as it relates to writing instruction– few things explain how using slightly different visuals can make a big difference in meaning than maps. For example, in my English 328 class, I have a bit of discussion about this with different maps of the 2004 election, different versions of the “red/blue” states from the 2004 election– basically, this site right here.

Now another potentially interesting tool I found via boing-boing, Worldmapper. Basically, it’s a collection of world maps based on all kinds of cool things– population, tourism trends, railway use, moped owners, etc. Neat stuff.

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DOPA is dopey

Will “weblogg-ed” Richardson and Alex Halavais have both posted about a bill under discussion in the U.S. Congress that would require schools to ban any web sites where students might see sexy things and/or be exposed to sexual predators. Apparently, the legislation is targeting sites like MySpace but it’s likely to catch all kinds of other services (wikis, blogs, etc.) in its net. Will and Alex say smart stuff about all this.

Personally, I still think MySpace is kind of stupid, and in a way, I don’t have much of a problem with schools blocking it from their computers. I mean, students while at school probably have better things to do than to browse MySpace. But my sense is that most of the kids using MySpace aren’t messing with it at school anyway.