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See this article, “Online Research Worries Many Educators,” which I found via Jerz’s Literacy Blog. It’s a pretty common lament of the loss of library skills by students because “everything” is available on the ‘net.

What, me worry?

Actually, I’ve seen the creep to online resources for a long time. I remember teaching first year composition as a grad student in the early 90s, and I had to require students to have at least one piece of research in their projects from an Internet-based source. Getting them to find that one thing– an article, a newsgroup posting, some early web page, whatever– was like pulling teeth. Oh, the complaints!

Nowadays of course, I have to require students in first year composition courses (and in graduate courses, for that matter) to find at least half of their materials for their research projects from sources that are not online. And getting them to do that– “what, you want me to go to the… the… (gulp)… library?!”– can be not quite as bad as it was to get students to find stuff on the ‘net years ago, but close. Oh, the complaints!

Well, first off, this article and this issue is something that I should have included in my recently completed section of 516 and I will include it next time around. Though I’m not sure if there’s enough “there there” to make it worth an entire class session.

Second, this article (like most complaints about online research) skips over the complexities about online research. I mean, there’s lots of “not credible” things on the web, but there are also lots and lots of “credible” things on the web. I know the New York Times has had its problems lately, but it is still considered a good source and it pretty much is the same online as it is in print. My library subscribes to WilsonSelect, a service that delivers full-text articles from a variety of print-based periodicals, including academic ones. And then you’ve got stuff like Kairos and Computers and Composition Online.

And third, I think the availability of online research is actually a good thing because it forces teachers to teach about issues of evaluating the credibility of sources. It used to be that teachers would just say “go find it in the library” or “it has to be an academic source,” as if that automatically meant that the resources the student came back with constituted “good research.” Teachers can’t make that assumption anymore, and since that’s an assumption they shouldn’t have made in the first place, I think that’s good.

I don’t know if this fits here or on my unofficial blog, but since this post involves computer things, I thought I’d put them here:

* Last week, I reaffirmed my computer prowess/expertise by installing some additional RAM into my iBook by myself. Well, almost by myself. And before I was able to reaffirm my computer prowess/expertise, I was plunged into the dismal depths of computer despair/clodness. I installed the RAM stick as the instructions from the Apple owner’s manual guided me, I put everything back together, I restarted my computer, and nothing. A black screen. Eek.

After a few minutes of panic, I went up to school, found my colleague Steve Benninghoff, and with his help (and these better instructions from the “do it yourself” section of the Apple web site), we managed to install the memory properly and my computer prowess/expertise. But man, there are few things more stomach-turning than taking apart and putting together chunks of your computer only to have it not work, and not really knowing if it will work again.

By the way, I went from 256MB of RAM to 384MB. It seems to make some difference, especially when I’m trying to open two or three things at the same time.

* On this same computer (an iBook G4 I bought last November and which I have been generally very happy with) is losing its L. Here’s a close-up picture of my keyboard:

The computer I replaced with this one was a G3 iBook that I used just about every day, and that keyboard is still completely intact. In fact, I’ve used Apple computer products for nearly 20 years now, and I never remember having problems with letters rubbing off of the keyboard. And why the L? None of the other letters are disappearing off of this keyboard, and it’s not like I’m typing “lllllllll” all day long. Weird.

I think I made my last trip to the Big Ten Party Store today.

For those outside of the Ann Arbor/Ypsilanti metroplex, let me explain: The Big Ten Party Store (which, under new management, has been renamed The Big Ten Market– I suspect this is part of the problem) is something of an institution. It’s a store on Packard in Ann Arbor that looks like the kind of place where undergraduates go to pick up kegs. But despite these outward appearances, it is actually a combination of a gourmet grocery, a wine shop, and a liquor store. We used to go there all the time because they have German breads and liquors you can’t find at a lot of other places around town, and because they have good prices.

Or they used to have good prices. I stopped in there today, on errands with Will. I was shopping for an undisclosed Christmas gift and I wanted to pick up a bottle of white wine. After looking around for a few minutes, I wasn’t really finding anything I wanted that was in my price range. A helpful Big Ten employee spotted me. “Can I help you select a wine?” she asked.

“Sure. I’m just looking for a chardonnay.”

“I see. Do you like a lot of oak with your chardonnay?”

“Uh, yeah.” And yes, I do understand the concept of “oaky” wine.

“And what’s your price range?”

“$10 or less.”

“Oh,” she said quietly, “I see.” She looked for a moment, at first said they didn’t have anything, but then she produced a California chard with a gaudy label. “I haven’t tried it yet, but our wine buyer always keep it in stock,” she said handing me the bottle.

I haven’t tried it yet either, by the way.

Now, I don’t know a whole lot about the marketing of wine, and I must admit to having only slightly above pedestrian tastes in it. In a store (as opposed to a restaurant, where I assume I’ll pay $20 for even a cheap bottle), a “normal” bottle of wine for me cost around $7; I will occasionally splurge and get something between $10 and $15; and I’m pretty sure I’ve never spent more than $20 for a bottle of wine in my life. Furthermore, while I have tasted wines that cost more than $20 a bottle, I can’t say that I found these wines twice as delicious as a $10 bottle.

In short, I’m a pretty simple wine drinker, and obviously, I am not the kind of customer that the new Big Ten is aiming to retain. I mean, why on earth would I go to a wine store where I can buy a grand total of one kind of wine for less than $10, especially when I can go to every other place that sells wine in this town and find a better selection in my price range? Furthermore, I know my prices well enough to know that they’re marking up stuff in there quite a bit. I saw wines on their shelves today that I know I’ve seen at World Market (a chain store that is kind of a Pier 1 imports that also sells foods, beers, and wine) and even the frequently over-priced Whole Foods for less. So why, I ask, would I go back there? Or, for that matter, why would anyone who knows enough about wine to know the price of it go back there?

Pretty stinky.

And that’s another thing: the store itself kind of stinks, literally. I don’t know what it is, but there’s been some kind of mildewy, basement kind of smell in that place for at least the last year. I think it had to do with some remodeling they did, when the new management opened up a space that had been blocked off previously. Perhaps the old management had that section of the store blocked off on purpose. In any event, basement smelling skank is not the kind of thing to sell me on over-priced wines, beers, liquors, and foods.

Sorry, Big Ten.

Update:
Just to add insult to injury here, the $10 bottle of wine I was talking about? It was corked– eg, “bad,” turned sour, spoiled, etc. So now I have to go back there to get my money back from these guys. Jeesh.

Take a listen to this story, “What we do when we ‘curl up'” from today’s edition of the NPR show Fresh Air. This is resident linguist Geoff Nunberg (and I ask you: what other radio or any other show has a resident linguist?) commenting on and analyzing this phrase, one that seems especially popular with my students when we talk about things like reading online: “that will never replace curling up with a good book.” Nunberg unpacks this phrase in lots of interesting ways, noting that one “curls up” with a particular kind of book, and the phrase itself doesn’t really appear until there is furniture comfortable enough for one to “curl” into. In fact, he even suggests a connection between the use of the phrase and the invention of the lazy-boy recliner. Cool stuff.

Updated (December 23):
I stumbled across this web site, which is the text of the Nunberg commentary, published (apparently) on Nunberg’s own site.

See this article from the December 10 Chronicle of Higher Education,“Help Wanted, Please: Applicant pools for top administrative posts are shrinking.” Actually, by “top administrative posts,” they mean university presidents (what, there are other administrative posts?), but I suspect a lot of what’s here applies to dean-level positions too. The fall-off in applications is described as something of a “mystery” in the article, but the two general explanations offered don’t seem that mysterious at all. First, a lot of people aren’t applying for these jobs because of the increased level of fund-raising demands associated with these positions. Second, a lot of people aren’t applying because of the mixed signals they get from the “head hunter” services that are routinely used for “top level” administrative positions.

My initial reaction to this is sort of summed up in the title of this post: never say never because never is a long time and I (hopefully) have another 25 or 30 years of “happy academic” life to experience, but other than a stint as a “department-level” sort of administrator (a Writing Program Administrator position, director of a graduate program, an assistant department chair position, etc.), I cannot imagine being an “Administrator” (as in the dean’s office, the provost’s office, or the president’s office). Being a “capital A” Administrator defeats the purpose of being a “happy academic,” doesn’t it? Deans and the like are in the office every day all day long, they do nothing but attend meetings, they write reports that are read by other deans, they deal with problems both petty and not, and they hardly ever see students. If I wanted that kind of job, I’d go back to school for an MBA and try to get a job with Ford or something.

And for the academic-type who sees herself as making an accademic contribution to the world as a “top level Administrator,” I have to think the idea of being vetted by a consulting firm (as opposed to other academics) is probably unpleasant, and the prospect of being an institutional fund-raiser/cheerleader is probably not attractive, either. Like I said, this doesn’t seem that “mysterious” to me.

By the way, EMU has hired a consultant in its current presidential search. My hope is that someone on that hiring committee reads this article and notices that a couple of the successful searches for “top level Administrators” that have been done recently have minimized the role of the consultants.

I’ve noticed two interesting technological developments at EMU. This might be old news at other places, but it is news here, a school that is one of the poor step children universities in Michigan (at least compared to favorite children U of Michigan, Michigan State, and, to a lesser extent, Wayne State).

* EMU is going to have a contract with Napster. It’s going to be free for students in the dorms, $10 a semester for students off campus, and $7 a month for faculty and staff. I’m not that happy about the fee for faculty and staff, but hey, I don’t download that much music anyway. I don’t know if this is the sort of deal that is happening at a lot of other campuses around the country, but it seems like a reasonably good deal. And according to the FAQ of the web site linked above, EMU is doing this as part of an “educational effort” and also as an alternative to illegally downloads. That’s probably true, but I bet the “legal and supported” service will ease the crunch on dorm computer networks.

* Speaking of networks: This is the last week of classes around here, and the parking lot in front of the building where I teach was an absolute zoo. I could go on and on about that, but I won’t. Anyway, while waiting for a spot to open up (and one never did open up), I stopped and opened up my laptop. I had left my airport card/wifi connection on and was about to turn it off when I found a connection. I don’t know where the signal was coming from (the nearby dorms? an administrative office with an especially strong signal?), but I made a connection and I was on and able to look over a few student’s web sites.

I don’t know exactly what the moral of that story is, but I will say this: I think I have better internet connectivity in the parking lot than I do in my office.

Will Hochman alerted the readers of tech-rhet to this article from last Sunday’s New York Times book section, “An Idea Whose Time Has Come Back” by Sarah Glazer. According to Glazer, ebooks are the fastest growing segment of the publishing market and are catching on with people who are used to reading stuff on cell phones, PDAs, laptops, and other computer screens.

Two things that occur to me with this article:

* Glazer talks a fair amount about libraries that have started to use ebooks. Both the EMU and the U of M libraries have some ebooks, and personally, I hate them. You have to be online to read them, which dramatically limits where you can read them, and because you read them with a simple browser, there’s no good way to annotate them. Icky.

* There seems to be some good evidence that suggests that the next generation of devices for reading ebooks is just around the corner. Glazer writes about some of what I had read in other places about improvements in displays and “electronic ink,” technologies that would allow a display that could be rolled up or folded like a newspaper. But ebooks have caught on (to the extent that they really have “caught on”) as things to be read on devices that do other things, too. Like Glazer, I used to think that we’d have stand-alone ebook reading devices; now I think what we’ll see in a year or two are devices that do a bunch of things, like a reader that also had PDA software, or maybe a cell phone with some kind of expandable reading screen. Maybe it’ll be a sort of iPod device with an attachable backlit display, something bigger than that little window. That’d be cool….

As requested, here’s a picture of me in the truck we rented on Friday, the one I used to almost kill myself with the snow blower (as previously mentioned).

Last year, on the old version of my unofficial blog (which I don’t want to link to right now because that old blog is just full of spam), I wrote about making my Grandma Krause’s Peffer Nuts cookies. Everyone has their thing at Christmas, and for me, these cookies/things are it. As I wrote last year, “Not really like the traditional German cookie Pfeffernusse, Grandma Krause’s Pepper Nuts are hard little nubbins of cookies that resemble little nuts, or, as a friend of mine recently put it, dog food. They have a pleasant crunchiness that tastes very similar to a gingerbread cookie, though not quite as strong, and, as the recipe makes clear, not ginger but anise.”

I made them last year, and I made them again yesterday, but this time, I had the help of a standing mixer. My lord, what a difference. It’s still quite a project because this recipe makes “a pail full,” as my grandma put it. There’s a lot of rolling out of the dough, and it just takes a long time to bake all of these things. But the trusty new KitchenAid mixer made getting the dough together not much more work than dumping the ingredients into the machine and turning it on. Sweet.

Anyway, here’s the recipe again, slightly altered based on how I did it this year:

1 cup dark karo syrup
1/2 cup molasses
1 cup butter, softened (or margarine or crisco or, in the old days, lard)
1 1/2 cups of sugar
1/2 cup hot water
2 tsps baking soda
1/2 tsp baking powder
1 tsp ground cloves
1 tsp cinnamon
1/2 tsp anise oil
1 tsp vanilla
1/4 tsp salt
7 cups (or so) flour

1.In your trusty KitchenAid standing mixer mix together the syrup, molasses, butter, sugar and hot water until well combined. If you lack a standing mixer, you can do this with a large bowl and a hand mixer.

2. Add everything else but the flour and continue mixing until combined.

3. Start adding the flour, about a cup at a time, mixing each time until the flour is well incorporated. If you have a trusty KitchenAid standing mixer, lucky you! You can keep mixing this until all seven cups of flour are combined. I shifted from the regular mixing paddle to the bread hook attachment after the fifth cup of flour.

If you don’t have a standing mixer (unlucky you!), you’ll probably have to give up on the hand mixer after the fourth or fifth cup of flour and knead the rest of the flour in as you might with the making of bread or pizza dough.

Either way, you may have to add a little more or a little less flour to get a dough that is moist but not sticky.

4. Take about a handful of the finished dough and roll it out on a lightly floured surface in long snakes that are about the width of your pinky. Lay these out on a cookie sheet. You can create different layers of the dough snakes by separating them with parchment paper or plastic sheeting.

5. Chill these dough snakes. Grandma Krause’s recipe said to chill “overnight or for at least a couple of hours,” but I stuck the dough snakes in the freezer for about a half-hour or so and that turned out fine.

6. When ready to bake, preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Take each snake and cut them into tiny bite-sized pieces of dough. Put the little dough pieces onto a cookie sheet, being sure to spread them out so they don’t touch either. The cookies will expand slightly in size.

7. Bake about 9 minutes or until golden brown. Cool them on a clean counter or a clean cookie sheet and store them in a sealed container.

One more thing that I learned last year: initially, the peffer nuts will be soft. But if you let them sit for a few days (covered, of course), they will get a bit stale and crunchy, which is the way that I actually prefer them.

See this, “IT Issues & Strategic Viewpoints in Higher Education” which was forwarded to the tech-rhet mailing list by the ever-wise and useful Nick Carbone. It is a report/summary of a survey conducted “among selected IT executives and professionals of director level and above from 52 colleges and universities across the country: doctorate-granting institutions, master’s colleges and universities, baccalaureate colleges, and associate’s colleges.” They list the “key results” on this web site; the two that struck me were:

* While 93% of colleges surveyed buy commercial CMS products, on average only 30% of their faculty use CMS to create Web sites, manage their courses, and integrate the Web into teaching and learning.

* CMS products from the vendors Angel (www.cyberlearninglabs.com), Desire2Learn (www.desire2learn.com) and eCollege (www.ecollege.com) were uniformly praised by their users. In contrast, WebCT (www.webct.com) and Blackboard (www.blackboard.com) were routinely criticized for skyrocketing prices, bugs, and ease-of-use problems.

There’s something here about how this was among the 14 universities, so I’m not sure that means that they talked to 52 people at 14 different places, or if these conclusions only have to do with the university people and not the community college people, or what.

They also talk here about the Sakai Project, which is an open source CMS tool being put together by a bunch of different universities, including that quaint liberal arts college over in Ann Arbor. Interesting stuff.