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See “Conventions of the holiday letter,” a story on NPR’s “All Things Considered” about those letters that all of us receive (and some of us even write) around this time of year. I had thought for quite some time that someone ought to study these things; Stephen P. Banks apparently did. When asked “what drew your interest to these letters?” he responded “Well, partly because we (referring to his co-researchers) had received holiday letters in our own past, and we found them to be kind of annoying.”

Ain’t that the truth?

I just finished posting my grades for the Fall 2004 term, which means I’m officially “done” with classes until the Winter 2005 term, which is approaching a lot more rapidly than I would prefer. I have a few minor things to attend to around here, and then my wife and son and I are going to my in-laws in Florida for Christmas. From there, my wife and I are flying to Philadelphia for the (in)famous MLA Convention. I might post a bit about those experiences at a later date, but since I’m interviewing for jobs this season, I think I’ll be mum for now and then kind of vague about it all after.

And then we fly back to Florida, where we’re staying until January 4. Normally, this wouldn’t be that big of a deal, but a) I am WAY behind on planning my winter 2005 classes, and b) the winter 2005 term starts January 5, less than 24 hours after we get back from this two week trip. Hang on tight.

Anyway, that’s also a way saying that postings here will be sporadic based on Internet connectivity, work I need to do, and fun in the sun I will want to have. Happy holi-daze, everybody.

As has been widely reported (here’s a link from WIRED and here’s a link from BBC News), Google is going to be scanning the books of a handful of libraries around the US and England, including the quaint liberal arts school in Ann Arbor.

The Ann Arbor News has an article about all this in yesterday’s paper, too. Among other things, it says that no money is changing hands (and Google isn’t saying how much this is going to cost), and they think they are going to be able to scan all the books in about six years. Hmmm… given that the U of Michigan Libraries has around seven million volumes, I think I’ll believe it when I see it.

This sounds pretty cool, but for me, two questions remain:

* What’s going to happen with copyright and “ownership” of these materials?

* How are patrons going to “read” this stuff? Right now, U of M (and EMU, for that matter) has some “books” that are available electronically, and reading/browsing them is an enormous pain. You have to be online to browse them, it’s a web-based interface, you can’t take notes really, it’s hard to copy and paste passages, etc. The searchability element will be great, but will library patrons of the near future be able to download this stuff to some kind of reader? We’ll see….

See this essay in today’s Ann Arbor News,“Student’s belongings hurled from 12-story window.” To quote from the article:

A University of Michigan student who told police he wanted to be famous broke out his bedroom window Monday morning in a high-rise apartment building and began hurling his belongings 12 stories to the street, Ann Arbor Police said.

As Officer Craig Devoogd approached the intersection of South University and South Forest avenues around 9:50 a.m., a large wooden dresser came crashing into the street, police said. A 5-foot-tall fan followed, both smashing into pieces.

Devoogd blocked the street as more belongings rained onto it and the sidewalk, Lt. Michael Logghe said. A desk, books, compact discs, pillows, computer equipment and personal items such as photographs and a genetics exam littered the street and sidewalk.

Not surprisingly, the young person was admitted to the University of Michigan Hospital for “observation.”

Yeah, finals are a stressful time, eh?

I’m mostly spending my time this week trying to wrap up my semester, but I of course have had to start planning for next semester, too. I put off thinking too hard for my Writing for the World Wide Web class in any great detail, in part because I wasn’t sure it was going to have enough students to “make,” and in part because it was too hard for me to think about right now.

And also in part because of the dilemma I have about the class as a “web”/computer class and as a “writing” class. On the one hand, while it is clearly important that students learn about some of the software required for making web pages, it is awfully easy for the software tools to crowd out the writing. On the other hand, a class that simply dwells on the writerly elements of the web at the expense of the software defeats the purpose. You can’t put “good writing” on the web without a certain level of mastery of the tools. And on the third hand, I think the students who sign up for a class like this kind of like the idea of spending more time with the computer tools.

Well, the clock has a way of helping you make some decisions, right?

So yesterday, five minutes before I had to go to my second of three meetings for the day, I called up the book store and ordered the following:

What Is Web Design? by Nico Macdonald. I haven’t read this one yet, but it comes highly recommended by several tech-rhet colleagues, and I was looking for something to replace Robin Williams’ The Non-Designer’s Web Book, which I saw as getting a little long in the tooth.

The Web Style Guide by Patrick Lynch and Sarah Horton. I’ve been using the online version of this book for years, and I think it’s time to get a hold of the paper version. There’s something about a tangible book that promotes students actually reading the material, but that’s another topic….

Cascading Style Sheets: The Definitive Guide, by Eric Meyer. This is the book that inspired my entry title, and if there was any question as to where I decided the class was going to end up in terms of the balance between “computer stuff” and “writerly stuff,” I think this book tips it toward the computerly. Plus this will force me to learn (along with my students) the ins and outs of CSS, finally.

Ought to be an interesting class…

I’m teaching two other classes in the winter term, but more on those later. For the time being, I have about 30 deadlines to meet and one procrastination blog entry is enough for one day.

Eh, so-so at best. The holidays are the time that everyone gains weight, right? The strange thing to me is I don’t feel like I’ve been particularly bad, but I still have probably put on about four or five pounds since Halloween. Oh well. At least it turns out, according to this web site, that surgery is not the answer for me.

Anyway, I’m not going to try to sweat it too much. We’re leaving for Florida a week from tomorrow and if I’m “good” between now and then, I’ll drop a couple of pounds. And I already know my New Year’s resolution/health and weight loss goals:

* Eat in “phase 2” of the South Beach Diet, which I am more and more convinced essentially is about “eating healthy.” I had a student this past semester who was a part-time body builder. On the web site he had to create for class, he had a page about the diet he was on while really trying to get in top body building shape: lots of veggies, eggs, milk, cheese, lean meats, whole grain breads and other products. In other words, South Beach.

* Go to the gym as often as I possibly can. In theory, I have a schedule that will allow me to go the gym pretty much every day next semester. We will see what happens in practice. Of course, now that we’re likely down to one car for a while, I will be doing quite a bit more walking, regardless of the weather.

* Ultimately, I’d like to lose about 15 pounds from where I am right now by my birthday, which is March 25. Doable, but….

We went last night for our (more or less) annual December trip to the Toledo Zoo for the impressive light display. After an early dinner at one of my favorite Italian restaurants in the area, Ciao, we headed out to the zoo. We had not gone to this light show this close to Christmas before, and that is something we’ll have to remember for next time. The zoo was, well, a zoo: took us 20 minutes to park, wall-to-wall people once we got inside, etc., etc. Anyway, to the pics:

Most of the lights are your “little bulbs wrapped around a tree” variety of things, but they do have some cool lit-up animal scenes like these:

This last one is an octopus on the side of the aquarium building.

Then there was this picture:

I bet there was at least one couple who got engaged by accident as a result of this one…

Anyway, we went inside to look at a bug exhibit that, as you can see, almost went terribly, terribly wrong:

‘Tis the season around here– no, not Chrismahanukwanzakah, silly; it’s grading season! It is the end of the semester here and the end of quarters and semesters at colleges and universities across America, and once again, all academic types, students and teachers alike, are worried about grades. This grade talk is all the rage right now on some of my favorite blogs– namely, Clancy “CultureCat” Ratliff and KairosNews– and a lot of other blogs I come across: Metafilter, and Jerz’s Literacy Blog, to name two. Why? Well, because of the obvious seasonal issues, attention is being directed to this column, “Grading System gets an F” by Ailee Slater, published in the student newspaper at the University of Oregon. Ms. Slater, who is a Sophomore studying English, is not happy with the system. As she writes in her opening paragraphs:

Finals week has (finally) come, which can only mean one thing: Let the bitching about schoolwork commence. Not that you haven’t been doing that all term.

Personally, I have come to the conclusion that the University system makes absolutely no sense. Students pay teachers to educate us, yet they are then allowed to tell us how much we’re learning. The whole situation seems akin to a boss paying her employee to clean toilets and the employee turning around and telling the employer how much she is or isn’t happy with the cleaning job. If I’m paying someone to do my housekeeping, I’ll be the one to tell the receiver of my hard-earned money exactly how well they did. Shouldn’t it be the same with education?

We are currently paying a large amount of money to attend this University and receive an education. If I have paid to be taught something, shouldn’t there be a repercussion for the teacher rather than, or at least as well as, the student when knowledge has not been taught?

As Denis Jerz and others have pointed out, the whole toilet cleaner=teacher analogy is more than a tad problematic, but I don’t want to beat up on Ms. Slater too much. For one thing, she’s already getting a lot of criticism, and a lot of it (as Clancy points out) is unfair, inappropriate, and flat-out sexist.

For another thing, I believe Ms. Slater is expressing a fairly common student critique of grades, particularly “bad” grades. “These darn students are just consumers,” faculty-types (happy or not) say all the time. Maybe. But while the “students as consumers” position has perhaps gotten worse in recent years, it isn’t exactly new. Indeed, before I was a Happy Academic, I was a Happy College Student, and when I was in Ms. Slater’s shoes nearly 20 years ago now, I think I and many of my colleagues more or less felt the same way.

In the end of her essay, Ms. Slater suggests that we simply “do away” with grades. I wouldn’t oppose that necessarily, because grading is by far the most unpleasant part of my happy academic job. And indeed, there are some schools that have done away with grades and instead have installed systems where faculty write letters, where students take classes pass/fail, and so forth. Such systems might sound interesting, but somehow I suspect “no grading” systems ultimately break down under their own bureaucratic weight, and/or they ultimately end up closely resembling more traditional grading systems.

In any event, I think Ms. Slater and her consumer student clan are going down the wrong path for several different reasons. First, since Ms. Slater is attending a state school that is subsidized by tax dollars in some fashion, she isn’t really “paying” entirely for her education. It varies from state to state (and I am aware that the state of Oregon doesn’t fund higher education at levels that are equal to many other states), but the fact of the matter is anyone attending a public school is receiving at least some “public assistance” for their education.

Second, students aren’t purchasing “grades” or even “classes” with their tuition dollars. Rather, they are purchasing the “opportunity” to earn a credential that is granted by an institution in the form of a degree of some sort: a BA, a BS, a MA, whatever. Each class and grade along the way represents a sort of mini “seal of approval,” all of which comes together in the completed transcript and the completed degree.

Furthermore, the value of this credential in the marketplace is generally tied to that institution’s reputation, constructed at least in part by how it evaluates and grades its students. Reputable schools (like the U of Oregon, like EMU) don’t allow students to merely pay for grades or degrees. Now, for the consumer student who doesn’t like the fact that their money doesn’t automatically buy them a passing grade, that their professors require them to do things like attend class, write essays, and take exams, they have plenty of “diploma mill” alternatives. The only problem is that the credentials that these schools sell aren’t considered to be “real,” which means they would probably represent an incredibly bad investment.

(And just to be clear about this: you notice I am using the word “credential” and not “education,” simply because they are not necessarily the same thing. Plenty of people in the past and present have been “educated” without attending or completing college, and plenty of people have managed to graduate from college without being educated. But the whole tie between educating and credentialling is perhaps the subject of a different post).

Third, and I try to explain this every semester with various results, students do not “get” (or “receive”) grades; rather, they “earn” grades. Grades are not gifts that are handed out randomly by a teacher; grades are earned (or not) based on what students do (or not). Simple as that.

As a Happy Academic, I of course want all of my students to succeed in whatever ways are appropriate for them. I want them to all be like the children of Lake Woebegon and to be above average. In that sense, I “care” about my students. But truth be told, I don’t really care that much about the grades they earn. I don’t automatically “like” students who earn “A”s, I don’t automatically “dislike” students who earn “D”s, and I’ve come to realize that students earn (or don’t earn) the grade they ultimately receive for too many reasons for me to contemplate.

So, one of the ways I stay a Happy Academic during this time of the year is to remind my students and myself what grades mean. Which is to say not much.

Okay, now to the grading…

My millions of regular readers will of course know exactly what I’m referring to in the title of this post, but just as a refresher: I am of course referring to the infamous EMU “University House,” the grand palace that Sam Kirkpatrick built for himself and his wife on EMU’s dime, the house that was the source of so much controversy and anger and passion on campus, and the house that ultimately cost Kirkpatrick his job. The Ann Arbor News has a nice site here that collects some of the previous articles they published about the controversy, and if you’re really curious, take a look at the July 2004 archive of this blog, the last time The House was in the news and on my mind.

Anyway, interim President Craig Willis (who everybody seems to like, btw) had a reception/party last night, and Annette and I went. Quite the event. After a golf cart ride from the convocation center parking lot (which is around the corner from the house) to the front door, we checked our coats and wandered into what was clearly the main “reception room” of the house, the place where functions are held.

We milled around a bit, and then we “took the tour.” Our original intentions was to “poke around,” but actually, we went on a real tour, one lead by an “EMU Ambassador,” who are undergraduate honors students who volunteer and represent EMU at functions like this. Incidentally, the student was a former student of Annette’s.

So, what did we see? Well, in the “east wing” of the house, just off the main room, the first thing is a large kitchen area which also included a small dining area and a sort of “family room” set-up. On the other side of the hall, there’s the president’s office (and our tour guide suggested that Willis did more work here than he did at the president’s office on campus) and the office of the EMU events planner. And then at the end of that hall is the “private residence” area, which I think basically are bedrooms and maybe some sitting rooms and such. We didn’t get to see that part of things though.

In the “west wing” (the other side of the reception room), there’s a caterer’s kitchen and a guest suite, which included a sitting room, a little wet bar area, a bedroom, and a bathroom. Oh yeah, there were bathrooms everywhere in this place, which makes a certain amount of sense since it’s a facility designed to hold events with lots of people. But on this limited tour we must have seen eight different bathrooms.

I guess I’m left with two general reactions. First, as one of my colleagues from another department at the function said, the money has been spent and while it probably shouldn’t have been spent on this, we might as well enjoy it. I don’t want to project a “let bygones be bygones” sort of sentiment, and I think it’s important for EMU to not repeat the many MANY mistakes of The House. But at the same time, we do have to go on here.

Second, I don’t quite get what cost $6 million. Now, I am of course not familiar with real estate in the seven figure price range, I realize that this was a custom built home that also had to meet the standards of a public and “institutional” sort of facility (normal houses don’t have a catering kitchen, for example), and we didn’t see everything. For all I know, the private residence part of the house is completely over the top.

But my reaction to what I saw was $2 million, tops. I mean, it’s “well appointed,” but it’s not like it has solid gold fixtures or crystal chandeliers or something. The House is on a fairly large chunk of well-landscaped land, and I know (from newspaper articles) that they spent more than my annual salary on pine trees. There are rumors that the Kirkpatricks (particularly Mrs. Kirkpatrick) had several changes during the construction process (as in “change those fixtures,” “move that wall,” “repaint that room,” etc.), and that can add to the cost. But $6 million? It’s hard for me to see where it all went, which is perhaps makes this whole chapter in EMU’s history all the more sad.

I’m not up at school today and I don’t know the whole story, but my EMU email isn’t working right now, and the server that hosts my students’ web pages is down, too.

Apparently, there was a “small flood” in the basement where they keep these servers. Oddly, the advice being offered from the ICT folks to department secretaries (who were then passing this message on to faculty and staff) is to turn off computers. I called the computer help desk to ask about this just now, and when I asked about this, the tech support person said “That’s to avoid a short from the server that could fry the motherboards.”

“Really?” I asked. “If that’s the case, shouldn’t I unplug the computer, maybe disconnect the ethernet cable?”

“No, just turn it off,” tech support guy said. Hmmm… me thinks I am being fed a shovel-full….

In any event, I was told they want to have the servers up again by 5 pm our time, but I think this is the “last strike” for me and EMU’s computer system. It crashes like a demolition derby driver; in contrast, the system that hosts stevendkrause.com has never crashed (at least not in my recollection) in two years. Putting two and two together, and it seems like it’s time to migrate everything (class web sites, academic web sites, all my email, etc.) over to something that I’m paying for and that seems to work all the time.