Category: Uncategorized

There’s been a lot of talk on the WPA-L mailing list lately about the SAT plans to have a writing component to the test. Besides some complaints about how the test is being administered, there are plenty of complaints about how the test will be scored, at least as it’s been described in an article from the Washington Post, “Scorers of New SAT Get Ready for Essays” (you’ve got to register for that site). I don’t want to rehash the argument/discussion on WPA-L, but even with all the problems (and there are plenty of them), it seems to me that the writing portion of the test is better than nothing, and $17-20 an hour to score these writing samples in the comfort of your own home isn’t bad, either.

But apparently there’s another test brewing out there. NCTE Inbox had a link to this New York Times article, “Measuring Literacy in a World Gone Digital” (registration required, but you probably know that). The article begins with a couple of paragraphs recalling the “good ol’ days,” when students did basic research with encylopedias or the library. Now it’s all about the web. (Deep and reminiscent sigh). Then it says this:

Now the Educational Testing Service, the nonprofit group behind the SAT, Graduate Record Examination and other college tests, has developed a new test that it says can assess students’ ability to make good critical evaluations of the vast amount of material available to them.

The Information and Communications Technology literacy assessment, which will be introduced at about two dozen colleges and universities later this month, is intended to measure students’ ability to manage exercises like sorting e-mail messages or manipulating tables and charts, and to assess how well they organize and interpret information from many sources and in myriad forms.

The rest of the article goes through the various pros and cons of this, and raises questions about the very concept of “digital literacy.”

I’d of course be interested in seeing this test, but what concerns me about it (at least based on the way it is described here) is the test seems to be about knowing how to use particular tools and not larger concepts. I suppose this is how a lot of these test work (or, really, don’t work), but it seems particularly problematic to do this with things that are digital because of the rate of change.

For example, how one sorts email messages or manipulates tables and charts depends a lot on the software being employed, and the way that one sorts email nowadays is quite a bit different than the way one sorted email 10 or 15 years ago. Remember pine? Lots of people used to use it, and I suppose a lot of people still use it. And pine was a “user friendly” software on unix, relative to “mail.” Will the person who uses pine be able to do well on this test’s questions about sorting email? If the test assumes a software package like MS Outlook, maybe not.

Ever see the great show Family Guy? Well, according to this link right here, you’re not going to see Peter’s butt any time soon.

It seems to me that this story begs two questions. First, have we as a culture and society reached such a restrictive and low point that it isn’t considered proper to show even a cartoon (eg., “not real”) ass on TV? Second, do the people at FOX realize that Peter has an especially unappealing ass, even for a cartoon character?

Check out Merlin’s List of Five Things. My favorite list (of what I’ve seen so far) is “Five things I fear I might do if I were a ten-foot-tall monster with metal claws, laser beam eyes, and razor-sharp fangs.”

The EMU community has always been in a kind of bad situation with textbook stores, and from my perspective, it is getting worse. I could go on and on about this, but in brief, there are four different book stores on campus. Three of them are owned by Nebraska Book, which owns over 100 college book stores around the country, and the book store in the union is at least operated (if not owned) by Barnes and Noble.

Over the years, I have had a variety of different “customer service” issues with all of these stores. Some have been relatively minor (not enough copies of a book, books coming in late, super-duper expensive course packs, etc.), some have been incredibly frustrating and/or rude. For example, this semester, I am using a book called What is Web Design? The book store says it cannot order it because it was published in the UK, this despite the fact that I can order it for $18 via amazon.com. And a number of years ago, I received such utterly poor service at Ned’s Books that I vowed I would never do business with them again and I have kept that promise. Incidentally, this bad customer service experience at Ned’s took place right after they were bought by Nebraska Book.

Anyway, in the old days, teachers and students simply had to suffer these indignities. But now, thanks to online booksellers, that is no longer true.

As is usually the case, I’ve had a number of students in recent years who are way ahead of me: they’ve been ordering books via amazon.com or textbooks.com or CheapestTextbooks.com or whatever. These online textbook sellers tend to be considerably cheaper, and they don’t make you stand in line for an hour, either.

To deal with the local bookstore’s inabilities to get the What is Web Design? book this semester and to make up for a shortage of books in another class, I told students to order them online. These are upper-level and quasi-tech savvy classes, but none of these students even blinked at the idea.

I have also given up making course packets in favor of EMU’s e-reserves system, which is a service operated by the library where it puts documents on electronic “reserve.” There are some problems with this system, not the least of which is I have to make the electronic documents (generally PDFs) to put on reserve. But it is free to students and it allows me to create “course packs” on the fly, something that is coming in handy this semester.

There is the argument that using the campus bookstores for my textbook orders allows students to sell their books back someplace. However, one of my more textbook technology savvy students told me that she just uses Half.com, which is the bookselling area of eBay. And besides that, the money that the bookstores give to students for their used books is pretty bad anyway.

The only other reason I can think of to use a campus book store for textbook orders is to deal with those rare students who have some sort of financial aid package that requires them to buy books and supplies on campus. In the short-term, I think these students might have to order the books through the store themselves, the same way any individual can order a book from a “brick n’ mortar” book store. In the long-term, I suspect these students will be able to order books electronically like everyone else.

So, what’s left? Why use the book store?

I’m listening to a story on NPR right now about the inauguration of W., an event I will thankfully be missing because I teach today, and an event I find particularly depressing.

I don’t subscribe to the various conspiracy theories about the 2004 election that are out there. However, you don’t have to be a political nutjob to think there was some funny business with the last election. In the January 2005 edition of Harper’s Magazine, editor Lewis H. Lapham has a compelling “Notebook” essay about some of these things. Just to mention a few:

• In one county in Ohio where there were only 638 registered voters, there were 4,258 votes for Bush.
• The private company that processed about a third of the votes cast in the last election, Diebold, is run by very vocal right wingers.
• In three states that relied mostly on paper ballots, the exit polls (the ones that had Kerry ahead– remember all of that stuff?) corresponded to the final tally. In six states that relied extensively on electronic ballots– including Ohio and Florida– the exit polls, which had favored Kerry, were oddly wrong. Bush won those states.

Check the piece out– interesting stuff, and not as crazy as the stuff on the ‘net.

Anyway, I am not much of a person to “protest” per se. I find rallies for various things like that kind of boring, and I have never made an effort to go to a state or national protest. But when I hear about the way that folks trying to protest this inauguration are being repressed in the name of “national security,” it makes me wish I had decided to find a way to D.C. today. I agree that there are legitimate security concerns– there always are. But not allowing protesters to have sticks to hold up signs and confining them to a small area has nothing to do with security and everyone knows it. Remember, Bush et al wanted people who attended their rallies during the election to sign loyalty oaths. Now these same people have essentially demanded a sort of loyalty oath by default from the tens of thousands of people lining the parade route, the tens of thousands of people attending a public event.

What loyalty oath will we be asked to sign next?

For me, there’s only one bright side to all this. With some confidence, I predict that Bush and the rest of the Republicans will either merely “over-reach” in some sort of political move (social security “reform” will be their first opportunity to do so), or they will out-and-out screw-up something that directly affects millions of Americans in a numbingly major way. I don’t know exactly what it’s going to be– maybe the war, the economy, maybe some something about terrorism– but I do feel pretty confident that this over-reach or screw-up will happen.

Or let me put it to you this way: had 9/11 not happened, had there not been this rallying around Bush for the sake of national unity, there is no way we’d be celebrating/mourning the second inauguration of GW Bush. Unless we have another 9/11 sort of event (and obviously, nobody wants that), my prediction is W. will leave office in disgrace and hopefully take his Republican congress with him. Perhaps this is wishful thinking, but I prefer to think of it as a hopeful prediction.

There’s been a lot of buzz in the blogosphere lately about folks being fired from a variety of different jobs because of blogging activities. Via the Earth Wide Moth blog, I found this link and this link on a blog called the Papal Bull. I’m certain that this list is incomplete, but it gives you an idea of the various types who have become recently unemployed.

A few thoughts about this in no particular order:

* I of course believe in the idea of free speech and people ought to be entitled to write and speak their peace. But, as Stanley Fish argued a while back, there really is no such thing as “free” speech in the sense of words without consequences. So it makes sense to me that (for example) people working at Starbucks who were writing on their blog about the poor quality of Starbucks coffee might have an employment problem. The rhetorician in me thinks that to not see that suggests quite a lack of basic “audience awareness” on the part of these writers.

* As I have mentioned before, I keep both this official blog (where I post things about academia) and an unofficial blog (where I post things about the rest of my life), and I try to divide up what I post where accordingly. I don’t think much about job security based on what I post in either place because of issues and traditions of “academic freedom” and tenure and because EMU is pretty mellow about these things.

However, that doesn’t mean I should or do say anything. I don’t make overtly negative comments about my students or colleagues, for example, not because there’s nothing bad to say (nothing is perfect, right?) but because that strikes me as both incredibly unprofessional and, well, dumb. About the only thing I’ve really vocally and negatively critiqued about EMU is the whole President’s House fiasco, but that was very much a topic in the public media/domain, and I was pretty confident that they weren’t going to fire a tenured faculty member over complaining publicly about the house.

In any event, I suppose you could say that what I’m doing is exercising “self-censorship.” But I prefer to think of it as “sense.”

* While I have written here before about my negative feelings about anonymous blogging, this particular situation seems one in which being anonymous isn’t such a bad idea. Of course, one could also argue that the person who feels compelled to anonymously blog about their bad situation perhaps ought to be spending her or his time getting out of that bad situation, and it seems to me that some of the folks on the fired list were trying to blog anonymously and got caught.

Via Collin’s blog, I found this, the “Rasterbator.” Basically, it allows you to take a graphic that is 1 MB or less and to blow it up to huge proportions– up to 20 meters, according to the web site. It’s a fun fun tool; I just have to figure out where I’d put such a giant poster.

I don’t know why, but Whole Foods is the place in town where I most consistently have strange encounters and conversations with complete strangers. Take today, for example. I was in there picking up a few miscellaneous things and some lunch. I was in the bread/baked good/cookie section, picking out a mooselick cookie (which is a vegan, super high fiber/whole grain/honey sweetened thing that is close enough to diet food for me) when I noticed a guy next to me talking to himself. “Huh, he doesn’t look crazy,” I thought to myself.

So I reached into the case with a piece of wax paper to select my cookie while the normal looking crazy guy kept talking to himself. I looked over at him again and he looked at me at the same time, one of those awkward moments where we realized we were both looking at each other. It passed and I started to walk away.

“Excuse me,” I heard behind me. Out of instinct, I stopped. “Excuse me,” this guy said again, and now that he was facing me directly, I could see that he had one of those cell phone earphones and microphones hanging out of his other ear. So he obviously hadn’t been talking to himself; he’d been on the phone. “Would you send out a letter and a resume for a job if you were unwilling or unable to go to a job interview?”

“Ah, no, no I wouldn’t.”

“Thank you,” cell phone guy said to me, and then he started back on with his crazy/cell phone conversation, “Do you see what I mean? I just asked the same thing….”

John “A Writing Teacher’s Blog” Lovas has a report/narrative about attending MacWorld this past weekend posted on this blog. Interesting stuff.

* This week has been characterized by the classic “three steps forward, three steps back” technique in weight loss. I was “good” for the first part of the week and had indeed lost three pounds. But then I was “bad” for the last part of the week (cookies, wine, going out for dinner, pastry, etc.) and I managed to gain it back. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out what I’m going to have to do to change this trend.

* I have really enjoyed my gym workout as of late. Essentially, I’m trying to “train” myself to jog. Slowly, and just a bit, but something more than just walking on the treadmill. I’m trying to get to the place where I can jog for fifteen minutes without slowing or stopping, and then we’ll go from there. It seems like a worthy goal, and it’s a good workout. Interestingly, I don’t really find myself getting out of breath– that is, I am not stopping because I feel like I am risking a heart attack or something. Rather, my legs give out, especially my calves. A bit of practice and I’ll be like Forest Gump.