Here’s a pretty cool collection of links of stuff that is handy in education. Of course, a lot/most of these things are “just cool” tools– e.g., del.icio.us, Firefox, Flickr, etc. Some of these things I have found to be very useful for teaching, but I have also had trouble convincing some of my students about this. Google Reader is a very good example of this, and I’m going to try to make a much bigger deal out of this in teaching in spring 2008. Anyway, good list.
The old hit parade
For reasons not worth going into, I spent some time playing around with Google analytics tonight and I learned a couple of fun facts.
- My old blogs are still getting more hits than this new one. I guess just because there is a lot more content there.
- Top hit on the academic blog? “Period Trick,” which has to do with resizing periods in a word processed essay to create the illusion of a length. Note this wasn’t my tip– just a link.
- Five of the top ten picks have to do with searches having to do with “flip video sample” and other related terms, which inevitably brings up this video of our dog Sophie playing with a ball.
Thank God I offer my thoughts on the state of academia for all to read.
Teaching online outside of the box (sort of)
In the interest of self-promotion, I thought I’d mention I’m scheduled to teach two classes this spring, English 328 (which is already full) and English 444: Writing for the World Wide Web, which still has some spots in it. As an aside: enrollments are down in general at EMU, I think mainly because of the very poor economy in the area. The conventional wisdom is that when the economy is bad, higher education’s fortunes rise as people decide to go to school instead or as they come back to school for more training/education to help them get a better or a different job. The problem right now though that the economy in Michigan is so bad that people are spending their money instead on a moving van and getting out of the area.
And yet the online classes continue to fill quickly. It’s a format that makes a lot of sense for students in the spring or summer terms, and I think it’s a format that appeals because of the lifestyles of a huge percentage of our students: commuters, workers, multi-taskers. I don’t know if all of the students who enroll for online classes really know what they are getting into and I do have long-term concerns about offering these courses responsibly. But in the short-term, they are clearly helping raise enrollment.
In any event, I emailed someone in CE the other day to ask a couple of questions that might really fall into the “don’t ask, don’t tell” category of things. The first was how much did I have to actually use the course management system that EMU has, which is called eCollege. It’s not a bad CMS as far as those things go, but it is still very much “a box” that makes certain assumptions about how a course works, and it can be kind of tedious to use. Besides, for a course like Writing for the World Wide Web, it seems to me that most of the writing and work that students should do in that class ought to be “out there” on the web and not behind some firewall. My second question was, given that I was going to be teaching just online this spring term, was I contractually obligated to hold face-to-face office hours.
I didn’t get entirely satisfactory answers. Like I said, don’t ask, don’t tell.
The person in CE I emailed about this (and btw, I think all the people I’ve had contact with in CE are really good folks) said that it would be “ideal” for me to use the CMS for various course functions, but also that they would have “no problems” with me using other “instructional tools” as well. The office hour question was even more sticky; basically, I can do online office hours but I had to do “at least some” of them on campus.
Will see how it turns out, but at EMU, where the faculty contract has a way of sticking its nose into nearly everything, these nit-picky details are things that will eventually be systematized at some point, I am sure. In the mean-time, I’ll post materials on the EMU CMS, but I’ll also post it all as free-standing HTML files, on the blog, or on the wiki. Hopefully I won’t get into too much trouble….
Warning– Blogging may kill you
From the NYT, “In Web World of 24/7 Stress, Writers Blog Till They Drop.” Basically, some of these professional bloggers are working to a point where they are hurting themselves:
Two weeks ago in North Lauderdale, Fla., funeral services were held for Russell Shaw, a prolific blogger on technology subjects who died at 60 of a heart attack. In December, another tech blogger, Marc Orchant, died at 50 of a massive coronary. A third, Om Malik, 41, survived a heart attack in December.
Other bloggers complain of weight loss or gain, sleep disorders, exhaustion and other maladies born of the nonstop strain of producing for a news and information cycle that is as always-on as the Internet.
To be sure, there is no official diagnosis of death by blogging, and the premature demise of two people obviously does not qualify as an epidemic. There is also no certainty that the stress of the work contributed to their deaths. But friends and family of the deceased, and fellow information workers, say those deaths have them thinking about the dangers of their work style.
Well, I think you can substitute “blogging” with occupations/pursuits/situations like “graduate school” or “working in a chicken processing plant” or “being homeless” or the like. It isn’t hard to think of things more dangerous than professional blogging. Still, it is a reason why it seems to me that it is better to be an amateur blogger.
I might be able to use this in the Writing for the World Wide Web class this spring….
A reason to figure out GarageBand
Though I probably won’t have time to do this, Radiohead is making the key tracks for their new single “Nude” available via iTunes so that fans can buy them and remix their own versions. Radiohead is going to post them on their web site, too.
Dude…
From boing-boing.net comes this post on craigslist, which I will reproduce in its entirety, about the pizza business in Ann Arbor:
To The Stoner Who Works At Cottage Inn Pizza
Date: 2007-09-18, 11:30AM EDTYou: the guy who answers the phone at cottage inn pizza
Me: Hungry and stoned out of my gourdI called you from my cell phone but had completely forgot who I was calling by the time you answered the phone. Of course, you were also baked to bajeezus and forgot to tell me that I had called Cottage Inn.
When you answered and said, “Whatsup?” I thought about it, and after a 20 second pause I told you that was hungry. You suggested I try a pizza, and I agreed that it was probably a good idea.
Then I asked you if you sold pizza and you said that you could make me one. I said I wanted anchovies and something else on my pizza. You asked me what that something else was.
We spent five minutes listing toppings until we figured out that I was trying to remember how to say: “Sun dried Tomatoes.” When you said: “We’ll bake that right up for you,” we both started laughing uncontrollably.
It was the best pizza I ever had; I just wanted to thank you for helping me out.
Ah, those sophisticates in Ann Arbor…
Not another post about pseudonymity
No, instead, I’ll point to this post on “Confessions of a Community College Dean,” where I left a long comment (I’m “Steve” in the comments, number 4 I believe). All of this in response to DD, Dr. Crazy, and this article in the CHE.
What does a Comp/Rhet person do? (or, taking the bait on two recent comp/rhet articles)
Via the wpa-l mailing list, I learned about two different and oddly related articles out there in the blogosphere: “What Is a Composition and Rhetoric Doctorate?” from Inside Higher Ed and “What is Rhet/Comp for?” from Mark Bauerlein in the CHE. The IHE article is reporting on a session from the current CCCCs about the “split” between composition and rhetoric, the future of PhD programs in the field, and the shift into more “media” and technology oriented kinds of things. The Bauerlein piece, basically, is him wondering why it is that the field of comp/rhet, when they should have the answer for solving writing problems in the workplace and everywhere else, is worrying about things like social justice, identity, inequality, etc.
Nothing new under the sun down there in NOLA, as far as I can tell.
Continue reading “What does a Comp/Rhet person do? (or, taking the bait on two recent comp/rhet articles)”
Take me out to the ballgame
Least you think that there has been no fun around here while the mice play at the CCCCs, I was lucky enough to attend a Detroit Tigers baseball game yesterday with Will and his fellow safety patrol members from Estabrook Elementary. It’s almost a game we missed– Will didn’t bring home the permission slip initially because, as he put it, he just doesn’t care much about baseball. “Neither do I, Will. But going to the ball game is fun!” So I talked him into it and he was glad.
I got to go along as a parental chaperone, though as far as I could tell, there were at least as many grown-ups supervising as there was children. It might have had something to do with the free tickets. It was also the first trip I’ve had on a school bus in years. Most amusing to me was that both on the way there and the way back, the kids were pretty successful at getting passing semis to blow their horn at us.
Anyway, it was safety patrol day in general at the park so there were many different youth groups on a clear but chilly day. I think it’s fair to say that the highlight for Will was hanging out with friends and eating a $5.50 hot dog. The highlight for me was shopping for but not buying and Tiger merchandise ($25 for a T-shirt I can get at Target for half that price? Thanks, no…), resisting temptation and staying on diet, hanging out with fellow parents, and discovering with my iPod that there was a wifi network in the stadium.
As to the game: like I said, I don’t really follow baseball much. But as far as I can tell, all this hype about the Tigers this year is perhaps ill-placed. This was their third loss, and as far as I could tell, they got spanked in this game.
Anyway, a pretty fun way to spend the day. I can’t very well complain about free tickets, but I think I’ll wait until the temperature is about 60 the next time I go see a game. For the curious, there’s a few pictures here.
Newspapers and the ‘net
A handy and recent article from The New Yorker that might be good for English 444 this spring, “The News Business: Out of Print.”