Notes from underground

Well, not actually underground, but with no internet access until today (the land of no internets).

Without access, I started reading more and writing more. If I couldn't think of an answer to a minor factual point in two seconds, it really didn't matter, since I knew I'd find the answer eventually. "Eventually" is a word that doesn't seem relevant in a Googleized world, but I'm warming to it.

Without access, I still wasted time, but I wasted it in different ways. I looked at the floorboards where I'm staying, which are a good foot across, and the crossbeams supporting the house, which are just peeled logs, and wondered when the last time trees that big were in this area. I wondered how, when the place got retrofitted for things like bathrooms and kitchen sinks, the owners decided where to put them.

Without access, I spent more time outdoors and in the sun.

When I finally drove the many miles to a place with a Panera and got online, I thought I'd be glad to be back in touch. Instead, though, it felt like an assault. I felt dazed as I sorted through the emails, as if Panera had melted away and left me with this world.

Then I got angry: why were people nagging me to do things? Of course they weren't doing anything but proceeding on the normal assumption that everyone is responsive to email 24/7/365; that's not their fault but mine for opening up the emails.

There's a lesson here someplace, but I'm not quite sure what it is. I think I'll drive back and stare at the floorboards some more.

Grading translation

As I finish grading the last projects for the summer course, I've invented a new comment to use (thanks, autotext!). I won't write the real version of it, but Spouse, to whom I showed it, translated it as follows: "I am tired of commenting on this mistake, which you have made numerous times before, and so I am not going to comment on it henceforth in this paper. This won't stop me from considering it when I assign your grade, however."

My version is more polite and positive, but you get the idea.

And again: thanks, autotext! I have been looking longingly at Macs recently, but they come with some flavor of Word 2007/2008, and I can't find the autotext feature at all. This is a dealbreaker for me.*

*P. S. Autotext isn't autotext if you have to use a mouse. Real backwoods computer users should be able to get everywhere--everywhere in Word, anyway--by using the keyboard. I learned this back in pioneer days with WordPerfect 5.1 (Anybody remember that? Hello? Hello?), where flying fingers and function keys were the name of the game.

Watching the robins

If you look directly at the mother robin, she waits on a branch until you turn your head slightly away. That means that you don't know that she's there and are less likely to be a predator. Only then will she fly up to the nest and stuff the upturned beaks with food.

The babies are in the nest on top of the porch light. It's a terrible spot, since people go in and out of the door all day long, but apparently it's a deluxe spot if you're a robin.

I've been away and Blogger thinks I haven't had internet access, or at least it has been giving its inscrutable error messages when I've tried to post. I soon won't have any access for a week or so.

But I did get an article sent out and can now work on other things.

That, and watch the robins.

All over but the grading

Summer session has ended--all except the grading, of course. As their final papers came in, I read and reread their messages, especially those who said they'd enjoyed the class or learned a lot or wished me a good summer (or all three). The papers may be another story, especially those who seem to have completely ignored the advice I gave on their drafts, but the messages were a pleasure.

Nobody I have ever met teaches summer school for the Joy of Teaching; you volunteer for it so you can make enough money for plane fare or what have you. And yet at the end of the day, it gives you pleasure to see that they liked or learned from (or both) materials that you worked hard to put together or that your feedback on their work was helpful.

Yes, they could be apple-polishing or hoping that a nice message will help them in the end, but I'd like to think this isn't the case.

And, best of all, we'll all shortly be done.

Laptops in classrooms (again)

This is more of an update than a regular post. From The Chronicle:

But professors who have banned laptops from their classes say there is no going back. Classroom discussions suddenly come alive when the laptops are gone, they say.

"If half the people are checked out, then the conversation just isn't going to be as rich," says David D. Cole, a professor at Georgetown University Law Center.

Apart from the problem of Web surfing, Mr. Cole and other professors say, laptops encourage students to become mindless stenographers during class. Since taking notes with a computer keyboard is much faster than with pen and paper, students busily take down every word uttered by professors instead of carefully listening and selecting the important points to put into writing.

A lot of us have been saying this for a long time now, but if the law school professors say it, it must be true.

Be careful what you wish for, weather division

Yesterday I thought, "I wish this cold, gray rain would stop."

I got my wish.

It turned to hail.

Then I wished that the hail would stop, although it was small enough to be kind of cool rather than scary.

Today I got my wish.

This morning it snowed.

The flakes melted when they hit the ground, but still.

I am done with wishing for better weather.

The next step might be a plague of frogs.

Vacation (?) misery

I started work at 5 a.m. today and feel as though I should have gotten up at 4.

I'm in vacation panic mode, which means that I have to leave soon and have a ton of deadline-driven work still to do. I will have to take it with me, along with the books that there's no Netflix for. I will have to make trips to a library an hour away to supplement these instead of hanging out with family. This is my own fault, of course, so as an extra added bonus I get to berate myself hourly for not working faster and avoiding the problem.

If I could send an avatar away on the trip I'm supposed to take and let the real me stay here and work, I totally would. Can't they hurry up with that cloning stuff so that I can have another me to work?

Oh, and why do some academics only admit to "research trips" and travel to conferences during the summer? Did they spring fully formed from the head of the academy? Why do I feel as though I need to hide the family part of this trip and emphasize its work part, which will indeed include a conference and some travel to collections, when I'm describing it to others? Could it be that, like the Marines, academics value toughness and a total devotion to the Corps over family life?

In The Atlantic: the decay of reading?

I don't mean that people don't read any more, the factoid with which fluffy-haired tv journalists like to scare us on a slow day. No, the July/August "ideas issue" of The Atlantic has an article called "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" (Spoiler alert: the answer is yes).

But the really interesting part of the article occurs at the beginning, when the author, Nicholas Carr, has this to say about his current reading habits:

My mind isn't going--so far as I can tell--but it's changing. I'm not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I'm reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I'd spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That's rarely the case any more. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I'm always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle. . . . What the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. . . . My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles.

When I mention my troubles with reading to friends and acquaintances--literary types, most of them--many say they're having similar experiences. The more they use the Web, the more they have to fight to stay focused on long pieces of writing.

This is unnerving. As we used to say in grade school, I resemble that remark. I thought that being distracted just signified an epic case of procrastination, but even in reading long blog posts, I've become the master of the topic sentence, skipping from paragraph to paragraph. Isn't the genius of New Kid's Random Bullets of Crap concept (I think she invented it) [Edited to add: It was actually Ianqui who invented this. Thanks, Dr. Virago, for mentioning that in the comments.] is that it's perfect for blog posts on days when you don't want to write a Henry Jamesian disquisition on what you're thinking?

Or--here's a contrarian view--is this kind of reading maybe just efficient? If Francis Bacon was right that "Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested," and we have more reading than ever to taste these days, doesn't it make sense to skim some things? And on the admittedly many occasions recently when I've skimmed something and forced myself to go back and read every sentence, guess what? There was usually enough repetition in the text, with extra examples and the like, that I'd gotten the main points the first time around anyway.

But "deep reading" really is a better system; for one thing, it feels less frantic than moving from point to point, topic to topic. What disturbs Carr, and what disturbs me, is that "deep reading" isn't the default any more; skimming is. Have you found this to be true, too?

I'd tell you about the rest of the article, but, in truth, I can't. I just read the first couple of pages and skimmed the rest.

A second reality check

Imagine that you have an online class and that all but one person is having no trouble with finding the site, finding the materials, completing the work, and so forth.

Imagine, too, that you have multiple e-mail addresses but that you have instructed your class (via the syllabus, Blackboard, e-mail messages to them, announcements, and so forth) to use one specific e-mail address.

What are the odds that the same person who couldn't see that there are writing assignments in the class if they were written on the side of a barn door has managed to sleuth out your least-used, most-obscure e-mail address, the one you rarely check, and has sent you multiple messages complaining that he or she can't understand how to access the course materials?

a) Nah, couldn't happen.
b) Infinitesimal.
c) A hundred percent.

You'll never guess this one in a million years.

I want a Netflix for books

File this under inventions I'd like to see: Netflix for books. If Netflix can do instant, on-demand viewing, why, oh why, can't university presses get together and create a service like this?

Like a lot of people, I'll be traveling this summer, and like a lot of academics, I need to take books with me. In the past, this wasn't as much of a problem. I'd pack a suitcase with clothes and a suitcase with books, and away I'd go.

But now, with the airlines waging unceasing war on passengers (my theory: Amtrak is pulling the puppet strings so the airlines will wither and die) and charging for extra bags and extra weight, that's not feasible. I would kill--well, pay, anyway--for access to books that I didn't have to lug in a suitcase.

The databases for journals have made this easy, but there's still no comprehensive option for books. What are the alternatives?

University of California Press has made some of its scholarly books available for free, bless its heart, but not all of them.

Google books has full-text versions of some useful books, but for most of them you just get the maddening striptease that they call "limited preview."

Questia has quite a few books, but many are older.

Netlibrary has a ratio (for my field, anyway) of about two scholarly books to about 25 repackaged public domain books that I can get anywhere.

Kindle looks promising at first, but its offerings are a lot heavier on the Eat, Pray, Love and Tom Clancy kind of thing than on the Arcades Project, if you know what I mean. In other words, stuff that I can buy in an airport bookstore I can also get through Kindle. Stuff that I can't get there, I can't get through Kindle, either.

What would a Netflix for books look like?

It would have to have affordable subscriptions or purchase prices, not the gazillion dollars that Project Muse and Ebsco extort from libraries so that individuals can never afford it.

It wouldn't have a proprietary device attached. Maybe it would come in .pdf versions that you could mark up.

It would be easy to access and have a good search feature. Maybe it could even emulate Amazon's "people who bought this book also bought X" feature.

It would allow you to get a "twofer"--an e-copy with every paper copy purchased. You could also just buy or rent the e-copy, for less money.

It would be centralized so you didn't have to go on a scavenger hunt to find the book you wanted.

I know, I know: digital rights, copyright laws, royalties, blah blah blah. But the movie companies aren't exactly holding hands and singing on a mountaintop when it comes to digital rights management, and Apple and Netflix have managed to make a go of things.

So I ask again: Netflix did it. Why can't academic booksellers?

And how was your day?

I've been working on something I'm very interested in and want to get sent out soon. No, that would not be one of the pieces with deadlines hanging over my head like a portent of doom; why do you ask?

So. I've been writing on this, immersed in it, until today. This morning was all about the online class, which has some hard deadlines if they're to get the information on time. This afternoon, 12-7, was all about a piece of work that is (1) pretty much a thankless task and (2) a monumental time suck.

Oh, and tomorrow is more of the same.

I see that What Now? has joined the Academic Writing Club for motivation, but even being motivated is no protection against tasks like this.

Oh, well. There's always this evening.

OT: Tech tips--why the fuss over Roku?

Updated to add: This reads very differently in 2021, when I am totally in love with Roku and it is my friend.

I'm confused about the fuss over Roku, a box that allows you to watch streaming video from Netflix for only $8.95 a month. The reason I'm confused is that Netflix members can already do this for free. You have to have Internet Explorer (it won't work with Firefox) and download the free player, but as far as I know, Netflix members have just about unlimited viewing for free. And the TV part? You just need to hook up the laptop to your TV as if it's an external monitor using an SVGA cable [or an S-video cable] and an audio cable. If you had an HDMI cable and a port for that on your laptop, you could probably use that, not that I've ever been able to make an HDMI cable work. Fellow tech nerd souls, what am I missing here? [Updated to add] An anonymous commenter has kindly explained that the $8.95 is for the cheapest Netflix subscription; if you already have Netflix, you wouldn't have to pay an additional amount to use Roku, just the $99 to buy it to begin with. Although the current system works well for now (laptop cables to TV), it sounds as though Roku might be worth a look. [Updated 4/24/09]: If you have a newer laptop with an HDMI port, an HDMI cable works even better than an SVGA or VGA cable plus audio cable.]

Random bullets. No, really. They're very random.

Horace's post about reading as productivity was right on target. I can read and read and READ and read and take notes--but that doesn't feel as productive as writing, however necessary it may be.

I am making a conscious effort to greenify, if that's a word, my daily life. I've been using my laptop instead of the big computer (it's cooler and quieter, so logic dictates that it is more energy efficient, no?), walking most places, getting the garden planted, unplugging the toaster and other instant-on appliances, and eating more leftovers. I had converted some time ago to CF bulbs and the lovely space-alien green glow that some of them give off (PR on these says "this doesn't happen," but they haven't seen them in my light fixtures), so I can't do any more in that way except use less light.

Does anyone else have a collection of small metal boxes left over from Altoids, loose tea, and spices? What on earth can you do with them? I hate to throw them away, because they look as though they'd be good for something, but they're starting to rebel and leap out of the cupboard because there are so many of them.

I saw a moose the other day when I was out driving, the first one I've seen around Northern Clime. It was a young one and seemed confused by the traffic. It can be as confused as it wants to be, as long as it doesn't leap in front of my car, which isn't much bigger than it is.

OT: A reminiscence sing

My mother called recently with the news that an elderly (and not close) relative had died at the age of 94. I knew her in a weddings-funerals-and-Easter-gatherings kind of way and had not seen her in some years.

Still in her teens, Great-aunt X had married in the depths of the Depression and had gone to live on her new husband's family farm, where the household included a fairly, um, exacting mother-in-law, assorted relatives, and eventually six children of her own. I can't even begin to imagine the amount of work that she had to do every day to keep everyone, including a bedridden mother-in-law, fed, clothed, and clean, let alone to do the work that women did on farms back then.

She lived on the farm, by herself but with family nearby, until going into the hospital about a week before her death. She was living there last summer and, at 93, was still canning peaches, tomatoes, and sweet pickles as she had done for the last seventy years.

She was the most cheerful person I have ever met.

Although I don't usually talk about my family, I mention her here because for years when I've wanted to whine about how much work I have to do and how demanding people are and--well, you know how those whines go--I would think of Great-aunt X and the work she did. What it reminded me was that there's the work I do, and then there's work.

Conference notes

Being at a conference: useful. Getting back from a conference: priceless, and worth every one of the premium chocolate-covered almonds that I scarfed down as a reward when I got home.

My paper went well, as did the other obligations I had at the conference. Secret message to panelists in the session I chaired: thank you for presenting your papers in the time allotted.

Secret message to people who congregate outside the open door when a session is going on: yes, we can hear you. No, we don't want to hear you; you're drowning out the panelists. Go away or shut up, please.

Secret message to the person who sat behind me and coughed and coughed and choked and coughed and coughed, only to leave momentarily, return, and begin coughing again: I know you want to hear the panel, but the rest of us do, too. Please reconsider sitting in the audience instead of standing by the door.

Is it a compliment to hear someone praise a point you made in the previous session if that person announces the point as though it has just struck him at a new idea? Is there such a thing as oral plagiarism?

Did you ever noticed that for some people you see at conferences, you only have about 5 minutes' worth of conversation and after that you don't have much to say, even if you like them?

The best part: taking a long walk through the city in absolutely perfect weather, seeing all the signs in a language that I couldn't read, smelling the fresh and dried fruits that I couldn't identify, and watching the people going about their daily lives because it's not Fabulous City to them; it's just home.

Conference world

I haven't dropped off the face of the earth; I've just been in conference world, a rewarding place in many ways but also a busy and tiring one. They could have held it in my back yard for all that I've seen so far of the Fabulous City where it's being held.

Reality check

If you were a student, and you knew you had signed up for an online course, and you knew that it was being held in Blackboard, and you knew how to sign in to Blackboard and had even posted comments on the discussion board, what would you say if you saw the following?

An announcement on the first page that announced the WRITING ASSIGNMENT.

An email from me announcing the first WRITING ASSIGNMENT.

An icon, obviously clickable, that led to the week's work, which included a page called WRITING ASSIGNMENT.

Lecture materials that referred on every page to the WRITING ASSIGNMENT.

A menu item, visible from all pages, that said "Syllabus," which coincidentally discusses the WRITING ASSIGNMENTS for the course.

A menu item that says "Lecture Materials," among which is the page for the WRITING ASSIGNMENT.

Would your reaction be this?

"I didn't know we had any writing assignments in this class."

Just checking.

[Edited for punctuation.]

What is to be done?

Two recent stories, one at The Atlantic and the other at Inside Higher Ed, raise an uncomfortable issue: what happens when the official policies of a college or university rub up against an instructor's standards?

The story at Inside Higher Ed is of the professor at Norfolk State who was denied tenure for failing too many of his students. Now, there may be issues here that aren't covered in the article--issues about expectations, for example--but this part is especially pertinent: Although school policy is that students must attend 80% of class sessions, many do not and receive passing grades anyway, since "there is a clear expectation from administrators — in particular from Dean Sandra J. DeLoatch, the dean whose recommendation turned the tide against Aird’s tenure bid — that 70 percent of students should pass."

The Atlantic story, "In the Basement of the Ivory Tower," is Professor X's meditation on the spot--between his shoulder blades, to be exact--where the good ideal that everyone deserves a college education meets his underprepared student, Ms. L:

By passing Ms. L., I would be eroding the standards of the school for which I worked. Besides, I nurse a healthy ration of paranoia. What if she were a plant from The New York Times doing a story on the declining standards of the nation’s colleges? In my mind’s eye, the front page of a newspaper spun madly, as in old movies, coming to rest to reveal a damning headline:

THIS IS A C?

Illiterate Mess Garners ‘Average’ Grade

Adjunct Says Student ‘Needed’ to Pass, ‘Tried Hard’

No, I would adhere to academic standards, and keep myself off the front page.

I'm troubled by both of these articles, so let's apply a little Lenin to the subject: what is to be done?

Institute more remedial preparatory courses at the college level? But in times of cutbacks, state legislatures and students taking out loans are both disinclined to lengthen the time it takes to get a degree.

Stop admitting "underprepared" students to college? This is troubling on a whole lot of levels, especially given this country's history of class, race, and gender prejudice.

Hire a lot more people to work one-on-one with people like Professor X's Ms. L? See the first point: who's going to pay for this?

Slide along and adapt grading standards so that the students who work hard can get the "gentlewoman's C-"? Isn't this what's happening, though, in the high schools where parents bully administrators to admit their kids into AP classes and then immediately start a campaign to water down the content since the classes are "too hard"?

Decide that college isn't for everyone? Professor X suggests this, but until there's equality of income and status for those who pursue alternate career tracks, it's not likely to fly.

What are your thoughts?

Graduation

"Watch the shoes," my colleague whispered as we settled ourselves into our seats, no small process where robes, hats, and hoods have to be adjusted lest they fall off at comical angles. She was right.

At graduation, the students are, for the first time in four years, all dressed alike. In fact, they are dressed like us: we all move somewhat stiffly under the unfamiliar dignity of robes at first, marching self-consciously to "Pomp and Circumstance." It's easier for faculty to relax, because they've been to a lot of college graduations and the students haven't. Then the students stop worrying that their caps will fall off and start to relax, too.

So, at the risk of sounding like a bad comparison and contrast essay, we are the same, yet different. They're wearing the regalia, varied only by the leis, stoles, and honor cords that signify their membership in various communities, and they're all there because they've achieved something important, as the smiles on their parents' faces attest.

Yet (comparison and contrast transition alert!) they are all different, too, and they--at least the women--want to express this through their shoes, the only part of the wardrobe that they have a choice about showing to people. I saw a lot of fashionably high heels with very pointed toes, and even though the wearers didn't always look terribly steady in them (these were very high heels; I have a pair and can only mince along in mine), these suggested women who weren't afraid that they'd fall on their faces in front of several thousand strangers when they got their diplomas. I also saw boots, sandals, sneakers, and some well-beloved shoes that were only a step up from flip-flops. I was later told that choosing shoes is a big deal, since they know that the shoes are the only thing people can see.

Yes, I listened to the speakers, heard all the songs, and was duly proud of the students I knew. Maybe it's just sentimentality (and I freely admit to being moved by ceremonies, even as I try to avoid them), but somehow I liked the idea that they were making this effort to be part of something that cost them time and money, that celebrated what they'd done, and that on the face of it emphasized how they were the same but that they'd adapted to show, even if just by their shoes, that they're all different.

OT: Tech tips--Xobni and Autotext

These are probably not news to everyone, but they are to me, so I thought I'd mention them here.

Xobni (inbox spelled backwards) is an indexer for Outlook. I usually use Google Desktop to find things, but this is faster. (Also, Google Desktop will sometimes tell you that you do have a message from the person you're looking for but won't open it, tantalizing you with its vagueness.) When you click on a message in your inbox, Xobni tells you the person's phone number (if the person has ever sent it in an e-mail) as well as telling you who else is in this person's "network." This freaked me out a little at first, because I thought there was some kind of web magic involved, but it turns out that it's all based on what's in your inbox already.

Autotext in Word. I've been using Word for years, but this was a revelation; it's perfect for inserting repetitive text ("You need a comma here") into student papers. If you're still running Word 2003--and everyone I know who has 2007 wants desperately to go back to the 2003 version--here's what you do:

1. Highlight the chunk of text you want to have as autotext.
2. Click on Insert, Autotext, New.
3. Give it a name in the box that pops up.
4. To use Autotext, Click on Insert, Autotext, Autotext, and scroll down until you find the short name that you gave it. I kept all the names to 2-5 letters for maximum speed.

Now, if you're like me and would prefer a faster way to do this than messing around with the mouse and toolbar, try this keyboard shortcut:
Alt-I-A-X and type your short name. The autotext appears in the document.
Want to put this into a comment? First, insert the comment: Alt-I-M. Then Alt-I-A-X (these don't have to be capital letters) and the short name.

I had never tried Autotext because of being scarred by Word macros at a tender age. To this day, one of my ancient computers has a copy of Word that, when you open it, opens Visual Basic first and demands that the macro be completed or canceled. I obviously screwed up the macro-making process badly at some point but could never get Visual Basic to stop harassing me. If I'd only known about Autotext, I'd have realized that I didn't need a macro after all and have spared myself two years of shutting down Visual Basic before I could open a document.

The benefit of all this is that I am, yes, actually looking forward to the first set of assignments from the summer school class because I'll get to practice my mad Autotext skillz on them.