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A few brief thoughts on Google +

As someone who has been on Google Plus for a little less than a week now, I too am a bona fide expert on this new social network– or at least as much of an expert as the people who haven’t really used it for anything yet but speculate on its usefulness.  For example, ProfHacker has a post here about it, and they point to an article in GradHacker here.

It is far FAR too early for anyone (certainly me, as an expert) to speculate too much about what G+ is for (or not); that said, let me speculate a bit on what G+ is for (or not):

  • Everyone seems most excited/interested in talking about hot G+ allows you to set up “circles” that sort out who you connect with and for what purposes.  For example, some of my circles are “comp rhet folk,” “EMU,” “Friends.”  So far, the vast majority of people I’m following are in the “comp rhet folk” circle and are fellow geeky-types who are mostly kicking the G+ tires.  Anyway, this is not that big a selling point over Facebook for me because I’ve been setting up groups for Facebook for a long time now.  I spent one afternoon a year or so ago putting all of my “friends” into lists, and I have a couple of lists (for example, “students”) which I regularly do not post updates to.  If that makes sense.  So while I agree that G+ makes it a lot easier to sort out friends, it is not as if this is completely impossible on Facebook.
  • One thing that is a lot easier with G+ is to “start over” in terms of the whole social networking thing.  If I were to do Facebook all over again, I wouldn’t have friended everyone I have; in fact, I might have even left FB to just the handful of “real friends” I have out there.
  • The most potentially useful part of this is the poorly named “Hangout,” which is group video chat, basically.  I haven’t used this yet and I am kind of dubious as to how well the group chat will work technically, but I can definitely see the point in trying to use this kind of tool for teaching, particularly for online teaching.
  • I’m a big fan of just about all things Google.  I love gmail and google reader– use them every day– and google docs and google sites are go-to places for me for teaching, working with collaborators, etc., etc.  Having said that, I have to wonder what is “in it for them” with G+.  Sure, Facebook is kinda evil, which is why it is useful to try to a) figure out how to set various privacy setting there, and b) remember that whatever you post on Facebook doesn’t just stay on Facebook between you and your friends.  But always remember that Google is primarily a media company, so how will they use this new service to sell ads and/or mine user data? (And BTW, literally as I am writing this, Jeff “Yellow Dog” Rice just posted about this very topic in some interesting ways.  And I also just came across this somewhat alarming discussion of the issues of privacy on ZDNet).
  • Right now, G+ feels a little to me like Ning.  As they describe it on their web site, Ning lets you “create your own social web site.”  This was at one point pretty popular with some of my MA students/colleagues interested in secondary education I think because it gave teachers the chance to “control” a social setting.  So you had some of the advantages of  a social network site but while closing out all the “nasty bits” of the internets and MySpace and such, those “real world” elements that secondary schools are always trying to make sure do not leak into the closed world of classrooms.  Well, the problem with creating your own social network is it isn’t really too “social” (and/or much of a party) if people aren’t showing up.  Which makes me wonder if G+ will go the route of Wave or Ning.  On the other hand….
  • … Who knows?  Before MySpace was “the place” to be, there was Friendster; and before Facebook was it, there was MySpace, which was sold off very recently for what is a relatively measly $35 million.  So who knows where we’ll be in a year?  Right now, G+ is mostly a curiosity and one that makes me think more about my relationship with Facebook more than anything else, but a year or so from now, maybe it’ll be the “go to” social network and Facebook will all but done.  And then my mom will join G+ and the “cool kids” will be on to the next thing.
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Past Tense Blogging

One of my quasi-productive/quasi-procrastination projects right now is going back through my previous unofficial blog and official blog (both of which I haven’t kept in over three years because I kind of combined them both here) and seeing what’s there worth saving before I delete that database to make a little more room for other databases/projects on stevendkrause.com.  I suppose I could take the time to figure out how to merge those past databases into this one (I don’t think it would be that hard to do), but it’s not all worth saving and it’s kind of therapeutic and fun to go back and read through all these old posts.  So sooner than later, I’ll delete those old blogs and redirect them (maybe) to a wordpress.com site I’m calling Past Tense Krause.

A few interesting (to me, at least) observations in looking through a bunch of old posts:

  • I’ve been blogging for a long time now.  I guess I knew that already.  I kind of was blogging right after my CCCOnline 2002 article “Where Do I list this on my CV” piece came out, but I think it’s fair to say my more formal blogging began in August 2003, wondering around with blogger and then MoveableType on my own server space, and then back to a domain name of my own (aka, here).
  • It is amazing how writings that are less than 10 years old seem super-duper out of date now.  Internet time, especially in talking about anything having to do with technology and tools.
  • Facebook has replaced a lot of the posts I used to make, especially just posting links to things, and especially on my unofficial blog.
  • A lot of what’s worth saving might come in handy for other chunks of writing later (or not), which I guess is one of the points of keeping a blog in the first place.  Of course, it’s pretty useless to say that if you never go back and look at old posts….
  • It’s amazing to me the number of links I have from just a year or two ago that are gone, and some of these are for pretty big sites that seemed at the time to be promising services/ideas or something that you would think would still be around.  All of which leads me to think:
  • The thing about the internets is that while it is true that it’s hard to “get rid” of something online once it has been posted there, simultaneously, it is so often so hard to find things from the past that no one bothered to save.  So while I do agree that putting anything out there on the ‘net means that it could come back to haunt you forever (I’m talking to you, Anthony Weiner), it is also can be a haystack full of needles.  I talk about this paradox a bit in version 2.0 of “Where Do I List This On My CV” piece here, but basically, while the web allows for access to text to zillions of people, the low access paper text has a better chance of “living” “forever.”  Lots of people (still!) stumble across my dissertation online and I suspect it has never been checked out of the BGSU library; and yet with a few shifting server spaces here and there, my online diss would be gone and the print would be left (note to self– move diss to stevendkrause directory).  I can still lay my hands on diary entries and old clips from 20 years ago that are in a box in my basement, while some of these internet files are a kicked plug away from vanishing.
  • Which makes me think that one of my other projects will be to print some of that Past Tense Krause out and stick it into a binder….
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On Micciche’s and Carr’s “Toward Graduate-Level Writing Instruction”

I guess I’m trying to make up a little for my tardiness with scholarship reviews by posting a second (or third?) review in less than a week, but it’s also an effort to keep up a bit.  I finished reading “Toward Graduate-Level Writing Instruction” by Laura R. Micciche and Allison D. Carr at the gym the other day and I don’t want to fall behind on this stuff again.  (For the citation-minded, this was in College Composition and Communication 62:3 February 2011).  The general topic of the article is on my mind because I will be teaching what is sort of the “capstone/before you do a project of your own” course in our MA program next year, “Research in Theory and Practice in Writing” and I want to try some new things.

On the one hand, I think that Micciche and Carr are right on track in that I think there is a need think more about writing pedagogy at the graduate level– heck, at all levels beyond freshman comp.  Micciche says she is trying to “demystify scholarship” by trying to bring the messy process out in the open, to more or less show how the trick works.  Along the way, I think she is emphasizing that it is good habits and practices and not “inspiration” that are what leads to scholarship, and no brilliantly thought-out and imagined piece of scholarship began as perfectly formed.  Carr is credited as a co-writer here, though her contributions (we are told) are mostly limited to the textboxes that appear throughout the piece, more or less in response to Micciche’s writings.  I think this is the most insightful one:

I have learned that badness is just part of my process, and I love the badness for helping me get to better-ness.  If I want to accomplish anything, I have to allow myself to have bad ideas, to write bad sentences, and to make bad claims.  Badness, I think, is my first language.  The fun is in the process of sorting it out, translating, recomposing in a more artful language others can understand and appreciate. (491)

Well said.  I’m always trying to beat perfectionism out of my students, which I think is sort of like embracing the badness.

On the other hand, I’m not so sure how much of Micciche’s approach is translatable/useable by others– or at least by me.  She’s teaching this course for all MA students in English at the University of Cincinnati, and I don’t think that would ever go over here.  It is more or less a “writing workshop” approach, which I know from past experiences is a mixed bag sort of affair:  while it can be productive and insightful, it can also produce a sort of “group-think.”  And I think that some of what Micciche is talking about here with a “pedagogy of wonder” is a little fuzzy for my way of thinking of these things.

Anyway, this article and/or some elements of its approach might find its way into ENGL 621 this fall.  It’s a tricky course in that it is supposed to be teaching students about research methodologies, about the logistics of our MA projects, and about IRB stuff, which is to say there’s too much going on in the course as it is.  At the same time, I don’t think it has done as much as it should do to show students the workings of presenting and publishing scholarship in the field– you know, conferences, articles, books, etc.– and it seems to me that even though 621 is already a pretty crowded course, it wouldn’t be a bad or difficult addition to have some discussion about what it is scholars in the field do.  And it also wouldn’t be a bad to have a discussion about some of the necessary habits of good writing and good scholarship, things that I think often trip students up when they are trying to finish those pesky graduate projects.

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On Rice and Gallagher on Assessment Scholarship

I was looking at it this morning, and I realized that I haven’t posted any “Scholarship Reviews” since way back in March and in response to Marilyn Cooper’s essay in the February College Composition and Communication. Talk about falling off the wagon/giving up on a resolution!  Well, I have various excuses, including pesky distractions from teaching, conferences, and life.  But I wanted to get back to it with a couple brief and belated reviews of articles on assessment.

What I’m thinking about here is Jeff Rice’s “Networked Assessment” in Computers and Composition March 2011, and Chris Gallagher’s “Being There:  (Re)Making the Assessment Scene,” which was in CCC from February 2011.  As a preface here, let me come clean and admit that I have kind of a bad attitude about assessment.  I understand formal assessment procedures are important for both internal self-reflection and external justifications and/or approval, etc., etc., but I generally find this part of my job and this kind of scholarship kind of, well, boring.  And I especially don’t like performing assessment in response to some external threat call, but more on that in a bit.

Both Gallagher and Rice use the word “network” in their articles, but they use those terms in very different ways, as Jeff discussed on his blog way back when.  Gallagher is using the term network more or less as synonymous with “relationships,” and he also references Burke’s darmatism as a way of explaining the relationship between various stakeholders (I hate that word– I’m not saying that Gallagher is making heavy use of it, just saying I hate that word) in the assessment process.  He includes various charts, including one that (idealistically?) includes students at the center (467).  Rice is referencing “network” as Latour uses it, which (to be simplistic and brief about it) is about the trace and dialog between all sorts of constituents/stakeholders.   Think very detailed ethnographies, tracings that go beyond just a “thick notebook” to show all of the sorts complexities involved in the workings of the assessed (31-32).  Rice argues on his blog that Gallagher misapplies network theory; I think that it’s more that Gallagher simply does not have Latour and “network theory” in mind when he employs the word “network.”

For Gallagher, assessment (as he discusses it, especially in relationship to “neoliberalism”) is an external phenomenon:  that is, some administrator or accrediting body asks for evidence that you are doing something right.  The network he’s talking about navigating is between teachers, students, administrators (I assume both WPAs and what I refer to around EMU as “the suits”) and what he describes on his chart as a “policy/corporate/technical/elite.”  This can mean all sorts of groups, but more or less entities demanding accountability.  So while Gallagher is suggesting we understand these relationships as existing as a network that is more complex than a simple hierarchy, he is still assuming the motivation for assessment in the first place comes from outside and (more or less) higher up.

Rice’s focus is assessment as a self-motivated and guided process.  I think he makes an extremely compelling argument that most conventional notions of assessment are designed to generate answers that the assessors (and the assessed) want.  For example, NCATE asks EMU (and other universities that certify school teachers) to prove X, Y, Z and– guess what?!– it turns out that the answers EMU gives proves X, Y, and Z.   That isn’t a truth-seeking or discovery activity.  Instead, what Rice is proposing ala Latour is more a mapping/descriptive activity, assessment as a way of figuring out what is actually being done and describing that network.

Both of these articles have strengths and weaknesses.  I think Gallagher is describing an approach for negotiating assessments that can often be an “us” versus “them” landscape.  But I tend to agree more with Rice’s take and purposes for assessment, though one of the problems is he doesn’t really have a chance to follow through on his plan.  He ended up moving from his position as the WPA at the University of Missouri to a new gig at the University of Kentucky.   What he’s suggesting here seems like a good idea though.

Two last thoughts:  first, when I was originally reading these pieces back in March and April, they sure seemed a lot more important.  Long story short, we have had at EMU an institutional assessment process that is/was complete pointless bullshit, and just as I was going to have to start thinking about this earnestly as the program coordinator, the provost quit and/or was fired.  So as of right now, there is a collective “what’s the point” sentiment on campus.

Second, I’d like to see some kind of administrator– a department head, a dean, whatever– ask faculty to do a self-assessment where they describe three things they think they do well, three weaknesses, and three strategies for minimizing the weaknesses and maximizing the strengths.  And I’d like to see these be less than three pages.

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The Happy Academic returns and answers the question “Should I get an undergraduate degree?”

The idea that college is a waste of time and money is not exactly new.  I’m not sure if it was this 1975 essay by Caroline Bird or not, but I recall teaching something like it in a first year composition class when I first started teaching in college in 1988.  But it sure seems like there have been a rash of articles lately once again raising questions about college, about how college grads can’t get jobs (as reported here in the New York Times) or that majoring in something in the liberal arts is foolish because it doesn’t prepare people for jobs, as Kim Brooks writes in her Salon.com piece “Is it time to kill the liberal arts degree?”

As the short (7.5 week) spring semester come crashing to an end here (I finished the grading for one class yesterday and my other class today), these things are on my mind.  Way back when, in previous blog incarnations, I attempted to answer the questions “Should I get a PhD?” (probably not), “Should I get a Masters degree?” (there are good reasons for this), and “Should I get a graduate degree in creative writing?” (sure, just as long as you know what you’re getting yourself into).  So I might as well round things out and talk about the undergrad experience as well.

Let me start with some things that I think are obviously true, though I am not sure these truths are as obvious to everyone:

  • The bigger issue is that every able adult in this country ought to have the equivalent of a high school diploma and ought to be functionally literate. We’re not there yet.  It turns out that those 47% of Detroit adults are illiterate stuff that was reported back in April/May is probably wrong, but still, the high school graduation rates in Detroit and similar metropolitan/poor people areas are not good.  So to me, before we go around talking about the pros and cons of a college degree, let’s be clear that we have a ways to go to cover the high school problem first.  Further, a lot of the problem with too many students going to college instead of seeking some other trade stem from policies in secondary schools.
  • A college degree has replaced a high school degree as an entry into the middle-class/white collar world. A generation or two ago, you could take a high school degree and get a job as a bank clerk, insurance sales apprentice, office manager, etc., etc.  Now that entry point is a college degree.  Does that mean these sort of general and entry-level white collar office jobs require that level of education?  No, but that’s the way that it is, and this is one of the problems I have with the whole “college isn’t worth it” crowd.  It is all fine and good to say that a college degree shouldn’t be necessary for these kinds of jobs, but in the real world where real people are actually trying to apply for jobs, it is.  Which leads me to my next point:
  • Seeking work in a “trade” or in “manufacturing” isn’t much of an option nowadays. We don’t really make things in this country anymore– or rather, we don’t make enough things to provide decent paying manufacturing or trade jobs, certainly not enough money to motivate people to think about that kind of work as a first rather than a third or fourth option.  Should it be this way?  Of course not, but it is what it is.  And let’s be clear that manufacturing work isn’t necessarily “livin’ the dream.” I’ve had several students over the years in classes who worked in factories of one sort or another (mostly involving automobiles), and the consensus from all of those students was that the work sucked, which is why they were going to college in the first place.  And speaking of this, there’s another issue that Brooks and others who point to places like Europe and their strong support of technical and trade training:
  • In the U.S., we believe in a “everyone should have the chance to be whatever they want to be no matter what” system of higher education. Instead of a system where students are more or less “tracked” into future career possibilities in their early teens through testing and the like (thus pointing some students toward some kind of trade school and others toward college prep), we have a secondary school system that more or less pushes everyone towards college, and also a system of institutions that can extend that opportunity to just about anyone who is able to graduate from high school.  Have lots of money and/or fantastic grades and test scores?  We’ve got an elite university for you!  Somewhere between pretty good and kinda mediocre with some money to work with?  There’s a “public,” state-sanctioned university near you!  Barely graduated from high school, don’t have any money, and/or just not so sure about this “school thing?”  Community college and you’re set!  And if none of those things seem appealing, there just might be a proprietary school where you can spend lots and lots of  money on a potentially worthless degree.  Given the American myth ideal of “opportunity” for one and all, I can’t imagine this changing.  And while I like promoting opportunity as much as any other American, there are some problems with this I’ll get to later.
  • People with college degrees are better off than people without college degrees in all kinds of different ways. This gets lost in the whole “college is a waste of time and money” argument, but that just doesn’t match up with the on the ground and current economic realities.  This MSNBC Money article does a good job of summing this up:  for example, college grads make 60% more than high school grads, and the current unemployment rate for people with undergrad degrees is 5%.  And along these lines:
  • Every article I have seen arguing that college is somehow a waste of time and money has been written by someone who went to college. Which to me means that a lot of these writers are some combination of bitter, forgetful, snarky, and/or ironic.

Anyway, given all that, the answer to the question to me is pretty obvious:  yes, you should try to get a college degree.  There are, of course, many caveats to this.

Continue reading “The Happy Academic returns and answers the question “Should I get an undergraduate degree?””

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Late spring gardening and out-of-doors around the house

June15-2The end of the spring term is tantalizingly close, just a few days away.  So very very close, almost done, almost done.  I should be grading right now, but I’m almost done, almost….  I’m not quite sure what it is about this term for me, but teaching has been even more this short (7.5 weeks) spring semester than usual.  But almost, almost…..

Anyway, while I should be grading right now (and I will be grading a batch of things for English 444 tomorrow no matter what because I have to get ready for the next waves for both 444 and English 121 on Monday and Tuesday), circumstances got in the way today, including some gardening and “running” with Will, and now we’re off to a function in about an hour.  So I thought I’d post some pictures and such about my garden and yard instead.

Here’s the flickr set.

It has been unusually cold and web this spring, so stuff has gotten in late and hasn’t really taken off yet, so there’s a lot of doubt about tomatoes and basil and the like.  At one point, I had planned on planting an even bigger squarefoot garden in this season up on the frontyard, which is the only spot that gets enough sun to really grow vegetables.  Even though my mother think that its tacky to grow produce in one’s front yard, it does happen around here quite a bit.  Still, it would have been a lot of effort and I’m glad I didn’t do it.  Maybe next year.

Oh, I’ve also included a few pictures of the robins next door.  This is in my neighbor’s tree, but it was probably closer to our house than to theirs, and the way that our windows look out by our fireplace made for fine nest viewing.  Here’s a link to the feeding action.  And that was just a few days ago– they’re all gone now.  Those kids do leave the nest before you even realize it.

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On 8th Grade, now and then

Will in the crowdWill graduated from completed eighth grade yesterday, and Greenhills had a lovely little ceremony celebrating the occasion.  Here’s a link to a few more pictures.

Unlike his “graduation” from 5th grade from Estabrook a few years ago, Will isn’t leaving so much as he is moving to a different level and a different part of the building.  Greenhills is somewhere around 500 or students 6th through 12th grade, which I believe actually makes the entire school smaller than his elementary school.  He will have new teachers and classmates of course, but he has already had some teachers who are teaching both middle and high school, and all but a dozen of his classmates from this year will be around next.

I’m about 90% sure we’re making the right choice in sticking with Greenhills.  We decided to go the private school route beginning with sixth grade because we weren’t going to be able to sell our house to move out of the Ypsilanti public school district and we knew that Greenhills had a great reputation.  A few minor issues aside, the ‘hills has lived up to the expectations, and Annette and I decided back then that if we were going to do this, we were “all in,” so to speak.

Will has had a bunch of great teachers– Mr. Wilson was his favorite, and I’m glad he got a chance to be in his class because he’s off to Emerson next year, but honestly, they’ve all been what I can only describe as “shinny pennies,” just some of the best and brightest.  He’s got great classmates, and while Greenhills isn’t as “diverse” as the Ypsi schools and Will is certainly not one of the “rich” kids in the group, it isn’t all a bunch of white trust fund babies either.  The school’s reputation as extremely solid college prep is well-established.  It’s been great so far and I expect high school to just continue that greatness.

Then why 90%?  Well, there are alternatives that cost considerably less.  A couple of Will’s friends are leaving Greenhills to public or other alternative schools, and one friend is going to the Washtenaw International High School.  I’ll be curious to hear more about that because it could be great– it’s free, and it promises rigorous academic standards and it is trying to be a part of the International Baccalaureate tradition of schools– or it could be not so great because it is simply the unknown.  And after all, there are lots of public school alternatives that might have been a good fit for Will, including Ypsi High.  We’ll just not know, thus 10% of lingering doubt.

But I’ll take that amount of doubt. Not too many things in life I’m 100% on, frankly.

Anyway, Will’s graduation completion made me think back on my own middle school experience so long ago.  The head of school/principal, Peter Fayroian, gave a nice talk about the transition from eighth to ninth grade (aka high school) where he described eighth grade as the worst year he remembered as a student.  Which made me think back to my eighth grade and how little I could remember of it.  I was a pretty geeky and modestly picked upon child whose interests in science and math were in the process of being crushed by my inability to keep up with that work.  I remember I hated hated hated my English class.  I had a “mentor” of sorts in an art teacher named Ron Streed who let me borrow some camera equipment for making goofy little stop-animation super-8s (by the way, I did a search for him and learned he passed away this past March– rest in peace).

Oh, and I don’t recall a completion ceremony, either.  Nothing for grade school for that matter.

But that’s about it.  Maybe that’s because my eighth grade was actually the middle of my junior high that went grades seventh through ninth, or maybe because the interesting stuff didn’t happen until much later.  Someday I’ll have to ask Will what he remembers of all this.

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Sprung

I have meant to post here about a variety of different things– some articles on assessment I read a while ago as part of my “reading academic journal articles” series, some iPad things, some garden things, etc.– but I’ve been more busy at EMUTalk.org and I have been swamped by the blessing and the curse that is “spring term” here at EMU.  What everyone else in the world calls “spring,” we call winter (e.g., the term that runs from January until April/May). “Spring” is the first 7.5 week term that runs from the first week of May until late June– specifically, June 2o this year, and then there’s “summer,” which starts up a few days after spring ends and finishes another 7.5 weeks later in August.

The good thing about teaching in the spring is money:  basically, I get paid “extra” or “overtime” money for teaching in the spring and/or summer terms.  It’s a significant amount, too– 10% of a faculty member’s base salary for each class taught in load– and its money that I have come to count on to pay for some very specific bills and for other “extras” like paying off debt, trips, etc.

The bad?  I suppose the main thing is it’s work, which is the opposite of “not working.”

It’s intense for everyone because, as I say frequently and mantra-like to my students, it is not half as long as a regular semester so much as it is twice as fast.  Students in both of my classes (I’m teaching a f2f section of “freshman comp”— which is only sort of about “freshman” in the spring since a lot of the students are juniors and seniors– and an online section Writing for the WWW) were voicing concern about the workload, and someone in my comp class asked aloud and a little indignantly just how much time did I expect students to spend on the class.  So I did the math.  The class meets for about six hours a week, and I always tell my online students that they should expect to spend at least as much time online and engaged in the class as they would if it were meeting f2f.  While I have never believed the classic college advice of spending three hours studying/working on a class for every hour spent in class, I do think about two hours per hour of class is a reasonable guestimate for outside of class reading, writing, studying, etc.

Give or take then, I told my students to figure on about 20 hours a week per class in the shorter term.  Add another class into that mix plus a job plus some version of “a life” and it is no wonder why so many students struggle in the spring, and no wonder why I feel pretty spent myself.

It’s not all bad, of course.  Students in the spring/summer terms tend to have some interesting “life” stories, and I have several of those students in both classes.  For the most part, the ones who have stuck with it have been doing well.  And while it is not quite as good as “not working” at all, a) there aren’t quite as many other meetings and such during spring and summer (though there are plenty), b) I do have some time to do more spring/summer activities (I’ll be gardening yet this morning), and c) I do like money.

Incidentally, two teaching strategy-type things based on stuff that happened in the winter are beginning to pay off for this spring.  In the online class, I have instituted an “online attendance” policy which more or less requires a student to post at least twice a week at different times of the week to demonstrate “presence.”  Mind you, this minimal attendance earns the student a bad participation grade, but the idea is that if a student is not posting at all, they are absent.  And, as is the case with face to face classes, if a student misses too much class, they fail, regardless of any other grade in the course.  I think this has “worked” in the sense that it has given a few students reality checks on what it takes to do an online class successfully.

The other different approach thing is based on last term’s “Gradeinator” approach with google docs.  Instead of doing all that, I’ve taken a much more simple approach in my English 121 class this term.  For each of the major peer review sessions of the class, I’ve set up a single Google survey.  Students complete the peer reviews for each of the writers in their groups, and they fill out the simple survey (here’s an example of what I’ve done so far) for each writer they review– typically three or four times.  Besides being dramatically easier, the nice thing about this approach is it keeps all the data on one spreadsheet (though I still have to go through some rig-a-ma-roll to get the results to individual students) and it makes it very easy for me to keep track of who has (or hasn’t) done a good job being a reviewer.  So this is a keeper.

Anyway, 18 more days.

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The conference that was #cwcon 2011

Technically, the conference is still going on:  in fact, as I (at least start to) write this, some of my colleagues from EMU (and others, of course) are presenting at the ever-popular first thing Sunday morning time-slot, which of course comes after Saturday night’s conference-sponsored bowling and Karaoke night.  But for me, things have wrapped up at C&W, and after this (or perhaps at different times of the day while writing this), I need to get back to spring term teaching, stuff around the yard, etc.

A few thoughts in no particular order:

  • In the end, I thought the folks at the University of Michigan Sweetland Writing Center pulled off an excellent conference.  I know there were some hiccups early on in the process and I’m still not a big fan of the conference web site, but these criticisms are trivial at best.  The facilities (mostly the North Quad, but also the UM art museum and the UM union) were fantastic, the food was great, things were well-scheduled and timely, the keynotes were provocative/interesting/sentimental (in a good way)/engaging (more on that below), and it is of course great that it was in Ann Arbor.  I’m hard-pressed to recall a better Computers and Writing conference experience– maybe when it was at UC-Davis, but that also was because of the side-trip to Napa.
  • Going to a conference that is this close to home has advantages and disadvantages.  It’s nice to sleep in my own bed and to save a little money on lodging, and it’s also really nice to know the town and the campus.  I enjoyed my quasi-tour guide role.  But it was also kind of a pain in the butt to have split roles in my life– doing things at the conference, while being expected/needed to do things around the house.  If I had been staying at the conference, either at one of the nearby hotels or the dorms, rolling out of bed for those morning sessions (including my own) would have been a little easier.  And I might have also been tempted to stay out later, though that perhaps would have been a bad idea.
  • I saw some great sessions, and as an aside, I think it turned out to be pretty smart for the Michigan folks to limit submissions to one per person and to have a space for folks to post materials online. I hope that web site hangs around for a while.  I learned a lot at the B02 session on “participatory publics,” especially some theoretical writers I don’t know at all (note to self– email Brown to get a copy of that essay).  I was going to go to Derek’s presentation, but the room was too crowded, so I went to the Dan Anderson and other UNC folks’ presentation about “peersourcing.” Cool stuff, and one of the things I took away from the conference overall was the growing interest in software aided peer review.   And I was really happy to see a presentation by some of my colleagues and students from EMU about ePortfolios:  they did good stuff, and I know that for a couple of them, it was their first conference presentation.  C&W was my first conference presentation back in 1994– ah, memories…. Anyway, congratulations to them!
  • As far as the keynotes go:  I’d say 2 out of 3 were good.  Tim Wu was generally a “miss” for me, not because he was wrong about what he was saying, but because he was being a little simplistic about it.  He concluded his talk by suggesting (basically– I didn’t take any notes or anything) we can either have a future internet where everything is open or everything is closed, and that’s it, and he pulled out the clichéd and incorrect argument about the “closed” system of the Apple store, the “lack of production” iPad device, etc.  Well, as Joyce Walker put it to me when we were chatting about this, had Wu made this kind of point at the beginning of his speech and then gone on to problematize that claim a bit, it would have been much better.  And Wu basically didn’t answer any questions.
  • As much as anything, Hawisher’s presentation was a trip down memory lane, but you know what?  She deserves that for everything she’s done for this community.  Congrats to her on all she’s done!
  • And I thought Kate Hayles’ talk was great.  I’m not sure I agree with all this cognitive science stuff as an explanation for how or why people read things like books, but I do find it quite fascinating.  She probably sold me a book, assuming it’s available on a kindle or other eReader.
  • I collected my plaque certificate for the John Lovas Memorial Weblog Award, which was very nice, albeit a little embarrassing.  Getting awards/recognition always makes me simultaneously egotistical and self-deprecating, and as lots of people (many who I don’t really know even in the “folks I see at conferences” category of things) said nice things to me about my blog and such, that just went on.  Anyway, thanks again.
  • And then there was our 3 minute per person roundtable, “Is Blogging Dead? Yes, No, Other.”  I’m obviously quite biased, but I thought that was great.  Honestly, I think this lots of people/three minute per person opener/lots of time and motivation for discussion is the way more of these things ought to go.  I liked how the conversation circled around the various terms and definitions, even to the point of trying to define what it is we mean by “dead,” and I learned a number of cool things– about storify, for example.  Denniz Jerz (among others, I suspect) put together all the backchannel tweets from that session in a storify space. I might figure out a way to lift this (and/or do something similar myself) and to then set up a space/place for presenters to share their thoughts on those tweets.  Stay tuned.
  • Oh, and last but not least, the unconference goes on (I hope).  The piece I submitted, “Is There a There There,” comes out of a “suspended” video project that will hopefully find a new home in the next few months.  I haven’t received a lot of feedback on it yet, but what I have heard has been pretty positive.  So if more people take a look at it, that’d be cool.
  • Funniest moment for me:  “Dude, a laptop is a computer.” Had to be there, I guess.

Anyway, that’s a wrap for me.  Now it’s on to (and/or to continue with) the home front and thinking about possibilities for next year.  Thanks again, #cwcon!

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But I’m still a happy academic, mostly

I have many other things I need to do (in the midst of teaching in the short spring term, minutes and notes from a meeting last week need to be written up and sent out, I have some writing about assessment I want to post here soon, etc.), but I thought I’d post briefly something I started this morning about a bummer of an article in Inside Higher Ed, “In for Nasty Weather.” It’s a long piece, but what it boils down to is the “academic life” is becoming a thing of the past as tenure disappears and as universities hire more and more adjuncts.

There is a similarly downbeat article in The Chronicle, by the way, this one titled “Crisis of Confidence Threatens Colleges.”

I have mixed feelings about this.  On the one hand, I largely agree with most of the article’s claims, and while I am generally not one of those “oh, the good old days” kind of people, I can say with some personal authority that things were “better” for me when I first came to EMU in the late 1990s, mostly because the institution still had some money to work with.  Hiring of tenure-track faculty in our department does seem to be trickier, and there’s lots of “administrative creep.”  The current political environment is obviously not that friendly to higher ed (tenure being generally under attack and so forth), there are lots of predictions of things like standardized testing in college, there are fewer tenure-track jobs, the value of “knowledge” and “education” in a wired/socially networked world is up for grabs, etc., etc.  These things are all very true and it is why I have been telling most students who ask about pursuing a PhD and an academic career that they shouldn’t.

But there are many other hands. Continue reading “But I’m still a happy academic, mostly”