I have other things that I want to/should be doing, but since there are a lot of folks coming to town in the next few days for the Computers and Writing Conference, I thought I’d put together a map of a few highlights of things that anyone coming to Ann Arbor ought to think about trying to do (with a heavy emphasis on food and drink). I tried to embed it here, but it didn’t work. Oh well.
Anyway, a couple of general sort of thoughts about Ann Arbor and Ypsilanti for the uninitiated:
Believe it or not, Ypsilanti (and Eastern Michigan University) is right next to Ann Arbor on the east side of Highway 23 toward Detroit. And for folks flying in: Ann Arbor/Ypsilanti is probably closer to Detroit Metro Airport than most of Detroit itself. In any event, we’re kind of on the far suburban edge of Detroit-city, so Detroit stuff is in range if you are into that sort of thing.
The easiest way to describe Ann Arbor is it is a very large “college town” with at least three main areas: South University, the “Diag” area/State Street & Liberty area (this is closest to the conference), and Main street. I tagged a few things on my map outside of that area– notably some attractions in Ypsilanti for those inclined– but most of this stuff is within walking distance from the North Quad.
Needless to say, I didn’t include everything– just places I thought were good, and a few places I’d strongly encourage you to avoid. That said, if you only have a little bit of time to get out and about, I’d recommend going down to Main street to eat, drink, and shop (and, if you are into comics and that sort of thing, go to the Vault of Midnight) and try to make time for lunch or dinner at what is probably Ann Arbor’s best known eatery, Zingerman’s Deli.
The other day, I received an email informing me that I’ve won the John Lovas Memorial Weblog Award for 2o11. Go figure! This comes after I’ve decided (or, employing the passive tense, it was decided) to shelve my research on blogs as writerly spaces, and at the conference where, on a panel I organized around the question “Are Blogs Dead,” my answer is “maybe” (see below).
But in all seriousness, I am honored and thankful for the recognition, and I am happy to once again point to the memory of a blogger that influenced many of the past winners of this award, John Lovas. I touch on John’s blog in my presentation briefly: his work (along with a lot of the past winners of this award) represents a very different kind of blogging then what I see going on now. If you look at John’s blog from way back when (this link is from the Wayback Machine) just for a moment, I think you’ll see what I mean. John’s blog (and many others from back then, including my own) have a decidedly more autobiographical, “diary-like” turn to them, more than ones nowadays, I think largely because of Facebook. So it’s interesting for me to be getting this award about “Weblogs,” something that sure seems a lot different to me now then it was back then.
Anyway, thanks again. And I also really want to point people to what I think is my most successful blogging project, EMUTalk.org, which receives many many more hits and comments than this site and which is devoted to local issues about Eastern Michigan University.
In other prequel for C&W news:
I’m of course looking forward to the fact that the conference is about seven or eight miles from my house and in a town that I know reasonably well. I kind of will miss out on some of the dorm/hotel/late night “hijinks” I suspect, but it’s always nice to sleep in your own bed.
Thursday, I’m planning on golfing– which I mention because if there are others out there who are interested in potentially joining us, let me know. Right now we’ve got a 3-some, and I could probably get two tee-times if there’s interest. I’ll probably get us on at either the EMU course or at a more user-friendly (read “easier” and “cheaper”) course in the area.
Friday, I’m going to conference stuff, and Saturday morning, I’m chairing a roundtable I set up called “Is Blogging Dead? Yes, No, Maybe, Other.” It’s at 8:30 AM, and it is going to feature Aaron Barlow, Bradley Dilger, Virgina Kuhn, Carrie Lamanna, Liz Losh, Brian McNely, Brendan Riley, and fellow local and certainly non-academic blogger Andre Peltier. We’re going to stick to a strict three minute (or less!) opening statement format followed by lots of discussion. I think it’ll be pretty good. Here’s my talk, all YouTubed and captioned:
By the way, adding those captions was bizarrely easy.
Saturday night I’m thinking about getting out the word to convince some folks to come over to the Ypsi side of things– Depot Town, The Corner, etc.– though that might be a hard sell since there’s plenty to do in Ann Arbor and I am sure that plenty of people will not have a car. And then there’s bowling, too. So we’ll see.
And Sunday? Well, the conference goes on Sunday, though I may or may not partake. Depends on how far behind I fall in my pesky spring term teaching.
Anyway, looking forward to seeing various C&W types soon.
I’ve been monkeying around with iMovie on my iPad 2 and this is what I put together as a sort of “proof of concept” for a simple, down ‘n dirty little movie, mostly just to see if it would work. As I say in the movie, it does work, mostly, though iMovie for the iPad does have some significant and frustrating limitations. The camera on the iPad itself is also pretty limited; as far as I can tell, no zoom, for example.
Still, even with the limitations, I think there’s some potential here. It’d be interesting to put a couple of these into the hands of students to see what they do with them.
After things didn’t work out with going forward with publishing the movie I made with some former grad students, I decided to go ahead and put it into the “Collaborvention 2011,” which is more or less the unconference/online portion of things that is along side the official Computers and Writing conference, which will be in Ann Arbor in a couple of weeks.
Besides what I wrote about our motives and what we’re looking for on that site, I have to say that getting this up online for some commentary and review from others (hopefully) is part of one of those “all things converging” moments in scholarship and practice. Alexandra Juhasz has a really interesting article in Inside Higher Ed titled “A Truly New Genre.” It’s about her video book project Learning from YouTube— which also looks very interesting and cool– and the many problems of getting it published and making things “fit” into the conventional publishing process. Heidi McKee and Danielle DeVoss have a call for contributions to an edited collection on “digital writing assessment” that I’m thinking about, and my CCCCs proposal is about the problem of “amateur” video (including ours) as a part of writing scholarship. So lots of different angles on video for the next few months at least, I suppose.
On the morning of September 11, 2001, I was at home not feeling particularly well– a cold or something. I mowed the lawn, and then came in and just happened to turn on the TV and saw a story about a plane crashing into one of the World Trade Center towers, a crash that network news first reported as an accident. Until the next plane hit, and then the Pentagon, and then a field in Pennsylvania. I think it’s fair to say that pretty much everyone in the U.S. (maybe the western world) who had a television (especially with cable) spent the next 72 hours or so watching the news, with breaks to nap, go to the bathroom, and drink.
Ten years passed and many many things happened.
Then, Sunday night (which, oddly enough, was the eighth anniversary of Bush’s infamous “mission accomplished” speech) I was getting into bed with my iPad at 10 pm or so, planning to read a bit on the kindle app before getting to sleep and ready for the beginning of the spring term. I checked Facebook first and saw someone (I can’t remember who) in my feed had posted that Obama was giving a previously unannounced speech at 10:30. Uh-oh, I thought, and got out of bed to turn on the TV, my iPad (with Twitter and Facebook) by my side.
Anyway, that makes me think of at least two things:
9/11 was a very clear “exigency” in that it was obviously the beginning of a new situation, although arguably from the point of view of Bin Laden, Al Qaeda, and related groups, 9/11 was merely the middle of a fight that began much much earlier– CIA involvement in Afghanistan, The 1998 bombings of the US embassies in Africa, etc. On the other hand, the death of Bin Laden doesn’t seem like an “ending” or a “decay” of this situation.
I’m not quite sure what it means that I have heard about this (and nearly all other “breaking news” in the last year or so) first via Facebook and/or Twitter, and then I follow it up with live coverage on TV, and then still later, with writings published on the web or even on paper. But it means something for sure, something about what “main stream media” is and is not still capable of doing well.
I have a variety of things I want to blog about– some reading on competing networks of assessment, a bunch of links I need to put someplace– and I have a variety of other things I need to do/stop procrastinating from– I’m talking to you, Written Communication web site– but I had to post about the mystery package from yesterday first.
I always love mystery packages. One of my favorite (still) unpublished stories (but not really a story because it does more or less recount something that happened) was about the time that Annette and I received a package addressed to us in our Richmond apartment but that was clearly meant for someone else. So I was intrigued with yesterday’s package, one which was delivered to EMU and was addressed to me.
At first, I didn’t recognize the name on the outside. Here’s what I found on the inside:
On the right is the package’s main contents, a copy of a journal called Readerly/Writerly Texts. I had an article published in a special issu of it back in 1999, an article titled “Teacher Learning (Not Teaching) HTML with Students: An Experimental Lesson Plan for Introducing Web Authoring into Writing Classes,” an article I’m tempted to give to a couple of my colleagues even though it is really ancient history.
Here’s a close-up on the front of the card:
Very nice. And the inside of the card:
After reading the note, I finally put it all together: as the handwritten part of this very clever card from Archelaus Fine Cards explained, this is from my former MA student Sheri France (I directed her project many moons ago). As she explains in the card, Sheri was moving offices from one place of employment to another and she thought it would be best to return her long ago borrowed copy of the journal I loaned her.
Ha! And they say there are no rewards in academia!
On the off-chance you are reading this, Sheri: you’re welcome, no worries about returning that journal so late, and if you get a chance to drop me an email to update me on your professional life to share on the writing program web site, let me know.
This is kind of scattered because I started it over a cup of coffee Monday morning and finished it Wednesday morning before meeting meeting meeting/grading grading grading. I’m super DUPER busy with wrapping up the winter term. The last day of classes was yesterday, and I’ve got at least four stacks of things I need to/want to assign grades to by the end of the day a week ago. I know.
But before I get to more detail than you want to know, I thought I’d make four general comments:
Partly in response to Derek and Alex and Kyle and I am sure others: I’m not particularly grumpy about the quality (or not) of the panels or anything else at this year’s conference. Yeah, the hotel was too expensive, but that’s why I didn’t stay at the conference hotel. Yeah, there was no decent wifi and I think that should indeed be addressed, but most major conference hotels have the same problem and I always plan ahead and assume I won’t have decent wifi anyway. Yeah, I kept running into the same people, but I kind of like that and I always have the odd experience of running into the same people at a particular year of the CCCC and not others– for example, last year I ran into Brian McNely everywhere, but this year, I didn’t see him once. Etc., etc. I think I preferred the Louisville location to Atlanta for a variety of reasons (though I had a lot of fun in Georgia), but Atlanta was a lot more reasonably priced than New York or San Francisco. And I don’t want to be too critical because….
… I don’t want to get involved. While I do have some complaints about how the CCCC and the NCTE do business in all sorts of ways (its conferences and a lack of willingness to offer alternative formatted presentations like poster sessions, its publications and its confusion about the paperless publishing world, its view of what an organization is and how it ought to fund itself, its dumb as a bag of rocks view of anything resembling the internets, etc., etc.), I feel like I more or less give up my right to complain too loudly when I am unwilling to do anything about it by getting involved in the organizations’ governance. I’m not willing to run for the Executive Committee of the CCCC or anything else involving the NCTE. I thought about it at one point, but it just isn’t the sort of administrative/service work that interests me– at least not now. So if I’m not willing to pitch and and “make a difference,” so to speak, then I can’t complain too much about the people who are willing to do that.
I don’t know if the conference has changed that much or not, but I know I’ve changed. The first CCCC I went to was (I think?) in 1995, and I attended and presented at the conference pretty consistently through about 2005 or so. When I was a graduate student and first starting my career down the tenure-track, listening to what people had to say at the CCCC was part of my education and presenting at the conference was real scholarship. But this year wasn’t my first rodeo, and I’m all tenured/promoted -out. I still learn some things from panels; but mostly, it’s variations on things I’ve heard before, simply by virtue of the fact that I’ve been around long enough to have heard a lot of stuff before. I still propose to the CCCC so I can get on the program (and thus some funding for the trip), but I need another CCCC presentation on my CV like another hole in the head. So sure, the conference isn’t as “new” and as “exciting” as it once was; but neither am I.
Having said that, I do think there’s more that the CCCC could do to reorganize itself (more like– dare I say it?– MLA by having subject areas organize panels instead of assuming that we’re all there to talk about freshman comp in some variety; have a wider variety of presentation-types; have published proceedings; etc.); and, in an era in which I can communicate with like-minded scholars all over the world via email and the blogosphere and I can publish a media-rich version of my presentation for free, I think the fundamental purpose of the “academic conference” has to be questioned. Why do we spend the time and resources to do this anymore? The answer to me is not panels; it’s being in meet/meat -space with other scholars in the field.
The biggest thing I get out of the CCCC at this point is the incidental contact. So, along with the actual and direct activities, here’s more or less the order of things as I remember it:
I’m getting ready for what is setting up to be a somewhat unusual CCCCs in Atlanta this year. My connection to the conference this year is not through a regular presentation, but through a couple of what i guess I would call “group projects.”
One of the folks who organize the CCCC IP caucus contacted me after my presentation on RiP! a Remix Manifesto last year and asked me I’d like participate in the event for 2011. How can I turn down an invitation? I don’t completely know how this will go, but I’m on a roundtable on RiP! during this session. Here’s a link to a web site I put together for it– it includes a little info on the movie and my notes. It might ultimately include some links/information from my co-roundtable-ish folks, one of whom is a former MA student here at EMU. So we’ll see how that goes.
The other thing I’m doing is a roundtable with some of my EMU colleagues, “A Department in Exile: The Challenges of Contested Spaces and Roles.” It’s an interesting story– at least to me– about how this all came about. When the theme of the conference was announced– “contested spaces”– I immediately thought about the literal contested space that we’ve been put in here at EMU, being displaced out of our building while it is being remodeled.
Anyway, I put together a roundtable with a bunch of my EMU colleagues and we sent it in. It ended up being rejected initially, which I found odd. I mean, I realize that the theme of the conference is supposed to be metaphorical notion of “contested spaces,” but you’d think that there would be room on the program for a literal discussion of contested space. So I appealed, and the good news was we were ultimately accepted into the program. The bad news is we are near the very very end of the program, the last session on Saturday. I am assuming we will be a group talking amongst ourselves.
So, in part to make the talk actually usable and to help my colleagues figure out what to do, I put together this video:
We’ll see how it goes. My assumption is that this will be a presentation like one I gave on a Saturday at the CCCCs in New York a few years ago, one where I put together a comic book of sorts, assuming (correctly!) that not a lot of people are willing to turn out for a Saturday presentation.
Part the “adventure” for this conference is Bill H-D and I are driving down on Monday and then coming back (with Derek M) on Sunday. Part of the problem for me with this version of the CCCCs is the IP thing is on Wednesday and the roundtable thing is on Saturday. It’s potentially not a good idea for all sorts of obvious reasons, but I didn’t like the idea of being in Atlanta the whole week without any transportation. Once again, we’ll see how it works out. The adventure starts Monday morning.
This morning, I stumbled across a “guest blog” at University of Venus (part of Inside Higher Ed) by Terrance Bradford-Muhammad titled “Creating a Degree for 10K.” Apparently, Texas Governor Rick Perryhas issued the “challenge” to his states’ universities to create a $10K college degree, one that included tuition and books. Right after that, Perry issued a “challenge” to Texas cattlemen to produce a steer with steaks that taste like unicorn and that poop cherry jelly beans.
I jest, of course. A $10K degree is ridiculous.
But Bradford-Muhammad takes on the challenge and suggests that maybe the way to get to that $10K degree is by following the outsourcing techniques suggested by none other than Tim “The Four Hour Workweek” Feriss. Here’s a long quote to give you an idea what I mean:
In Timothy Feriss’ 4 Hour Workweek, he discusses the idea of “Automation,” meaning building a sustainable and automatic stream of income. It includes several techniques like drop-shipping, Google Adwords and Adsense, and outsourcing, all techniques a university could use (TimothyFeriss: OutsourcingLife). In some cases it has already begun.
The private (for-profit) sector residence life program I worked for was outsourced to a third party housing provider that leased land from a university. The company built and maintained the buildings, operating the program with its own employees. This cost the state nothing and, instead, put money in the state’s pockets (if a state can have such things).
Still not a believer? Think of this. Drop shipping is a product delivery method where the seller accepts payment for an order, but the customer receives the product directly from the manufacturer. In these arrangements, the retailer is the middleman between the manufacturer and the customer (Wise Geek). Think of online universities and of the professors who teach part-time from their homes. The state could rid itself of “brick and mortar” classrooms and arrange a teaching contract between the professor and the students, allowing the professor to decide where, when and how learning would take place. Cost to the state? Nothing.
By the way, Bradford-Muhammad is a PhD student in “student affairs” at the California Institute of Integral Studies. Not sure how that studying is going there, frankly.
For the sake of argument, let’s assume that Feriss’ system is foolproof and sound, so simple that all you have to do is describe it and it works. It’s not that Feriss does not have any good points– I’ve written about some of them before— but I think it’s going to take a wee bit more than referencing a chapter in a pop self-help book to make it so. But still. Also, let’s just assume that a) the compensation for this kind of work was comparable to what professors earn now, and b) all of the other key trappings of the “real job” aspect of things– minor details like insurance and retirement plans– could be addressed. Two more mondo-huge assumptions, but again, let’s just go with it.
On the one hand, this system would be pretty sweet: “the university” then becomes more or less a broker matching up students to instructors, and the students/instructors work out the details. In fact, in a broad sort of way, this is what is happening now in the realm of teaching part-time and online: you pick up an online class here and an online class there, and through that, the instructor cobbles together some version of a paycheck. Hypothetically, someone who either negotiated a higher salary than the usual per-class rate or someone who was willing to take on a ridiculous number of classes could make some very good money.
But Bradford-Muhammad is forgetting one critical thing about the way universities operate. At least two-thirds of my time as a tenured professor is spent on things other than teaching. Besides teaching (and by “teaching,” I mean assigning things, leading discussions, creating assignments, and the tons of reading/grading I do associated with specific courses, all of which I am doing online currently), I have lots of responsibilities involving things like meetings that make the “business” of the department go ’round; I advise students about degree programs or particular classes; and I work with my colleagues on developing and changing curriculum. And by the way, these other “not teaching” things today occupied more of my time than the teaching things yet again today.
Oh, and I didn’t mention any assessment or program review work, also stuff we need to do nowadays in part to satisfy people like Rick Perry who are demanding accountability in public educators. That’s not an unreasonable demand, even if the the process of institutional assessment/program review is often pretty goofy. But it is also not a cheap demand to satisfy.
Anyway, it’d be nice if drop-shipping and outsourcing could work in this setting. If it weren’t for the fact that most of the cost of higher education has nothing to do with the teaching.
Incidentally, in my more grumpy academic moments, I’ve wondered about the finances of this kind of approach on a personal level: that is, how many courses would I have to teach in the shady world of proprietary and/or online universities to get to the break-even point relative to my current salary and benefits? Twice as many courses a year? Would the trade-off of not having to deal with any of the non-teaching stuff make it worth it?
And say, what if I followed Feriss’ advice and outsourced some of my own grading and other paperwork in the process? Can a part-time instructor hire a subcontractor? Hmmm… that’s just crazy enough to work….
As a previously sanctioned iPad expert, I felt obligated to at least go and check out the iPad 2 in the Apple store today. Now, if you want a long, detailed, and smart review of the new iPad 2, go read this piece at Engadget. But if you want my five to ten minute thoughts, read on.
First off, I showed up at the Apple Store in Briarwood at 10:30-ish or so and there was a line out front. Am I going to have to stand in line to go into the fracking store?!? I thought. Happily, no; this was for people who were planning hoping to buy one today. More on that in a sec.
Anyway, that problem solved, I went in and started playing with a white iPad 2 (if I get one, I might go with white). True, it’s thinner and lighter than the original iPad, but not that noticeably so, in my view. It was noticeably faster with the new processing chip, though most of the apps I monkeyed with were the same on this as iPad 1.
From my point of view, the two big differences with this new one are GarageBand and iMovie. I downloaded GarageBand for my current iPad just the other day, and it is a complete hoot to play with. Now, I have no musical talent whatsoever and no real knowledge of audio recording technology. The only thing I can do with GarageBand on my computer is record podcasts and other audio note/response recordings along those lines, and for all I know, the GarageBand for the iPad is, relative to these other tools, crap. But it seems pretty powerful to me.
iMovie will not (apparently) work on the first generation iPads, and this might be the thing that really pushes me into the iPad 2. It’s kind of a shame because recording video from another source and importing it to the first gen iPad seems like it would be a workable solution to me. Anyway, frrom what I can tell, iMovie for the iPad is a lot like all of the other apps for the iPad (and this includes GarageBand, I assume): they might be better called “lite” versions of the desktop software because they are just that, stripped-down versions. I know more about iMovie than I do about GarageBand, and this was very clear in the few minutes I spent on it.
Oh yeah, and there are the cameras too. Here’s 13 seconds of video I took:
The first lesson learned here is that it is perhaps best to video in landscape mode, but you get the idea. I don’t know if there is a way to zoom with this video, but I suspect there is, and I know that I could have cropped it in different ways in iMovie, either on the iPad or exported to the full version on a computer.
One other thing I learned in my 10 minutes: those snazzy magnetic covers that are available with iPad2 don’t work with the original iPad, which is a bummer.
Will it be worth getting one? Well, depending on how the rest of birthmonth works out, sure, I think so. Though it might be tricky. It turns out the store was sold out of them, and one of the guys working there told me that people were waiting there in the hopes that maybe– just maybe— there were some iPad2 in the shipment that was due to arrive any minute. Jeez, it’s like trying to get a Wii all over again. On the Apple web site, they’re saying 3-4 weeks for shipping.
To me, the real usefulness of these things for me are potentially in teaching, especially when it comes to things like the movie project I have students do in English 328, the “media authoring” course I’m trying to get off the ground at the graduate level, and/or the kind of simple multimedia projects students do in first year writing. Basically, for $500 for the iPad2 itself and another $100 or so worth of software and maybe some other add-ins (a microphone, for example), you’ve got a device that can take (so-so) photos, record audio (including an instrument plugged into it), and record HD video. And with iMovie, GarageBand, and Pages, you’ve got a pretty powerful and simple multimedia platform that is damn near perfect for teaching and the enthusiastic amateur. And it all weighs less than a pound and has a 10 hour battery life. Whoa.
