Job market signals from another planet

Dr. Crazy has a good post on the job market, with lots of great advice. I haven't written a post on the job market this year for fear of repeating myself (here and here and here), but there are a couple of things I've heard recently which have made me wonder if those of us giving the advice are operating on another planet from some other people.

1. Tailor the letter or not? I heard recently that some job candidates on the market had been given the advice "Don't bother to tailor your letter to the institution. It's a waste of time. Just give them the boilerplate and move on." My reaction wasn't very moderate; it was somewhere between "no" and "hell, no!" I've been on search committees and have chaired a few, and, like Dr. Crazy, I believe that tailoring the letter to the institution makes a difference. Part of the advice I gave in one of those earlier posts is "Don't make us guess. Connect the dots for us by showing why you fit our qualifications so well." I think that still holds true.

Let me put it this way: If you don't seem interested in the position--or interested enough to show some faint glimmering in your letter of who we are or what we're about, or even what the position is about, why should we think you'd be interested in coming to work for us? Let me be even more blunt: unless you are really, really exceptional, if you don't have time to show an interest in the institution, we don't have time to show an interest in you. Frankly, we receive too many applications to pay attention to those that are obviously sent as a pro forma exercise.

2. Lead with teaching or research? It depends on the institution, but for heaven's sake don't leave out the research entirely, even if it's a teaching institution (another piece of dubious advice apparently handed out by someone not trained on my planet). You need to have both. Oh, and please be specific about what you're doing in terms of research and teaching. "Student-centered learning," etc., is all well and good, but we get that in every letter. What do you do in class? Do you have an innovative exercise that makes the students respond really well to George Eliot? Tell us!

What I said a couple of years ago still holds true: Make your research sound exciting. When I think back to the search committees I've served on, after questions of fit and suitability for the position, the excitement generated by the possibilities of the candidate's research program is really what sticks in the mind and makes the candidate stand out. Also, don't make us do the math: if it's exciting and has great potential for changing a field, explain how that's the case. If you are the first person to study the social significance of lawn mower blades in consumer culture, you need to tell us why that is important. You recommenders will do this, too, but it's your letter that we read first.
3. Thank you/no thanks? "If you get a campus interview, don't send a thank-you note; it makes you look desperate." "Always send a thank-you note, even after the MLA or phone interview." What do you say, search committees? My take on this: I don't think it makes a huge difference, but since when is being polite considered "desperate"?

4. Have your dissertation chair give personal contacts in the department a call? What do you say, internets? On the one hand, it's nice to have a personal recommendation. On the other hand, as a search chair this always made me uneasy, since we just had to put that information in the folder for HR anyway, and we could never be sure how much weight to give this kind of informal recommendation.

I'd love to hear from those of you who are hiring this season so I know whether we're on the right track or whether it's time to get the old Interplanetary Passport renewed so I can go back to my own planet.

Update 11/16/09: Profgrrrrl has a good list of tips.

Gender Bias Bingo

Want to play? You have to submit your own story, though, to get the t-shirt, and it's not clear what kinds of privacy safeguards are in place. http://www.genderbiasbingo.com/games.html

Blogging the scholarly writing process at Georgetown

Carol Fungaroli Sargent at Georgetown's Office of Scholarly and Literary Publications is blogging her writing process as she works through Wendy Laura Belcher's book Writing Your Journal Article in Twelve Weeks. It's good stuff. Here are some samples:

"Writing doesn't have to take long. We only ask for an hour a day, although you can give it more if you're so inclined (a typical Booklab faculty member with a family does between 1.5 and 2 five days a week if a project is underway, and adds weekends only if it is due). Just that small commitment can yield more than most professors ever produce, and it can easily result in two articles per year and a book every two-three years."

"One of our authors read in a book that you should 'touch your work every day,' meaning that you should keep the project you're writing in a place where you can find it, and you should sit down to visit the work each day even if only briefly, in order to move things along. I completely agree with this. Some days it feels as though all I can commit to is opening the computer file, but once I begin then the body in motion does truly tend to stay in motion, and often I keep writing. Science is cool that way."

"3. No matter what happens, I will keep this commitment every day, and I will submit something, however poor and miserable, on the 23rd. This is writing as bricklaying, writing as plumbing, writing as a regular-person job. Artists take commissions all the time, and this is my commission."

Random and highly inconsequential bullets of this week

It's true that some people can read conference papers at close to the speed of sound--good papers, too, though if you're taking notes, you'd better give up before you start.

Speaking of taking notes, why is using laptops to take notes still tacitly verboten in conference sessions in the humanities? I first tried it 10 years ago and was too cowed to try it again until now, when I sat at the very back of a large session and typed my notes instead of writing them down. Since typing is my natural medium, as I suspect it is for most academics, and the notes are clearer and more organized, why don't more people type them? Or would you be suspected of doing what a person a few rows in front of me did--pulling out a laptop to check email and look up the subject of the presentation on Wikipedia?

What stopped me from typing notes in any other session was that ridiculous Windows music that plays when you start up--Bill Gates, are you listening? How about letting us turn that off? We know we're in Windows; we're not so self-esteem-impaired that we need a "Ta-da!" to celebrate turning on the computer.

When I went to check in on the return flight, the person behind the check-in desk asked if I would be checking any luggage. "No." "How would you like to check that bag if I don't charge you for it?" "Sure!" He put the tags on it, saying something about "faster to get everyone on board" if people checked luggage.

No duh. Did the airlines just figure out that we're all carrying suitcases to put overhead instead of checking them? Or that with trying to find overhead space, gate-checking bags, helping the elderly folks to put their bags overhead, and the rest it takes twice as long to load a planeful of people as it used to, even with the flight attendants haranguing you to get out of the aisle? I'm grateful to the renegade check-in desk person for his action and hope that the higher-ups in the airlines, who have probably never flown coach in their lives, will start to rethink their position about charging for luggage.

As we were waiting at the gate, a little kid, probably about two, was laughing and running around in the area with his mother in pursuit. I smiled, but the guy next to me grumbled, "Hard to tell who's in charge of who!" I said, "She's probably just letting him run around to get him tired out for the flight," to which he said, "Hm! Does he have to run around here?" I didn't want to be part of that conversation, so I moved away, but honestly, Cranky Guy: get a grip. Nobody likes it when babies cry on planes, including the parents, but babies can't help it: they're babies. They don't cry as much when they sleep, and they sleep better when they're tired, and if they're toddlers or little kids, they're more apt to be tired if they run around before they board. What part of that equation don't you understand?

[Edited to add: And I'd rather listen to a dozen babies cry than hear the loud-voiced blowhards who for some reason feel compelled to talk about various air disasters as we're taking off.]
[Apparently you can disable the startup sound: http://www.ehow.com/video_2361110_disable-annoying-windows-startup-sound.html. I wish I'd known that sooner.]

The writing process: taming your inner two-year-old

Peg Boyle Single on daily writing at Inside Higher Ed:

Motivation in writing comes from prewriting, prewriting, prewriting. Motivation occurs when you have done the necessary planning steps so that when you sit down to write prose, you have had time to subconsciously play around with the ideas and you only have to retrieve and type down the ideas, not to think them up. Motivation occurs when you have a very detailed long outline, filled in with citeable notes, by your desk that guides your writing. The citeable notes are short phrases (written in your own words) that remind you to insert the appropriate references into a particular section.

This is excellent advice, as it is every time we hear it. (Single freely admits that Boice et al. give some of the same advice). She also recommends that you not write more than 4 hours a day and claims that this will lead to an enjoyment of the writing process.

Here's why I brought up the inner two-year-old. You can make a two-year-old sit in a chair, just as you can make a writer sit in a chair. You can give her a book or something to play with, just as you can sit there with a blank computer screen and no internet. You can even do the old parental "false choice": "Do you want The Very Hungry Caterpillar or Avocado Baby"? Chances are, she'll fall for one or the other. But on some days, she won't. What you can't do all the time is control her thoughts. I submit that your brain is--or can be--that inner two-year-old.

Maybe Brain accomplishes a lot when you're sitting in your enforced writing chair. Maybe you get a lot done most of the time. But sometimes, Brain decides not to kick in then and has a delayed reaction.

Example: Say you've followed Single's/Boice's/Sylva's advice and have sat at your desk despite little productivity that day. You ignore the recommendation letters waiting to be written, the papers waiting to be graded, the class prep--everything. You get in the car (and you're already behind and anxious about it, because you haven't reread the work or graded the papers that are due back to students because of the sacred writing time) and start your 45-minute commute to campus.

Suddenly, your brain comes to life. Ideas are washing over you; it's a Flannery O'Connor epiphany and no mistake. "I've got to write this down," you think--except that you can't. You get to campus and go straight into class. Seven hours later, after you've taught, gone to meetings, and met with students, you have a dim recollection of something transformative that occurred to you this morning, but everything isn't there.

That's why I'm wondering this: can the repetitive action of sitting down to write tame the mischievous two-year-old that is your brain?

And a less frivolous question: does it work to force yourself sit joyfully at the writing desk in the morning if you have a full day ahead of you and a recalcitrant brain?

Short post on excuses

Like Ianqui, I've wanted to write an excuse to my blog for not updating just because things are getting busy.

But one of the things I was busy at was busy work--mundane stuff for an organization that took me a whole day to do (think sorting, filing, stapling, labeling, stuffing envelopes). I'm not doing it again. Ever. I've just learned that there are machines for that (yes, I'm slow on the uptake). There are not machines to work on my major project for me. Invoking my new book review mantra, I--or the organization--can buy the service, but I can't buy back the day I spent on the task. I'm chalking this up to my own ignorance about what could be automated and not to the organization, which isn't to blame for my stupidity and probably would be happy to pay for the service.

When I thought about explaining this to the organization, at first I wanted to say that I couldn't do the task because my shoulders hurt after doing it (true). In rehearsing this with Spouse, however, he said, "Don't make it a personal issue. You're not doing it any more. You don't have to give a reason except that it can be done by machine and you won't be spending your time that way."

Dr. Isis has some wisdom about exactly that reasoning this morning:

Regardless of how you choose to allocate your time, I have learned recently in conversation with a group of more senior women in academia that there is something that we do that our male colleagues don't do -- we over explain, and that can color how people perceive us. For example, assume that you are chillin', getting ready to leave for your child's school play in two hours and someone says, " Can you attend this meeting in two hours?" A woman is more likely to say, "I can't. I have to go get my child and then attend his school play." A male colleague with the exact same play to attend to might say, "I can't. I have another commitment."

I should have known this--indeed, did know it--but one of the things I'm realizing over and over again, despite the Lessons for Girls, is just how hard it is to say no. Or say no and not explain.

The shadow knows

Just a quick post to say that lately, if I'm in conversation with a group of people or at a conference, and we're talking about etexts or libraries or academic blogging or the future of the book, I find myself wanting to say, "You're so right! I wrote a blog post about that just last week and said --"

But since it's Professional Self and not Shadow Blog Self having those conversations, I just say, "You're so right!" and beam a smile back at the person. Sometimes I'll go ahead and reiterate the arguments I've made here, but I am always a little worried about it--as though this minuscule portion of the blogosphere is read by multitudes.

I guess Professional Self wants to claim credit for everything good but is too cowardly to own up to all the rants and everything else that comprises a blog. Shadow Blog Self is a little more forgiving about the imperfections of blog utterances, so for now, SBF owns it, and PS doesn't.

This is your brain on multitasking, part 2

At the Chronicle, Mark Bauerlein is a little late to the party--he's just figured out that texting while driving might, just might, not be a good idea--but he cites an interesting study from Stanford in support of his proposition that multitasking is changing the brain, and not in a good way:

The primary finding was that "People who are regularly bombarded with several streams of electronic information do not pay attention, control their memory or switch from one job to another as well as those who prefer to complete one task at a time." When people spend months and years trying to multitask, their mental habits follow. Most important, their capacity to filter out distractions and irrelevant items deteriorates. As one of the researchers put it, "They're suckers for irrelevancy." The researchers set up experiments that isolated the ability to ignore things that didn't help subjects complete a problem, and low-multitaskers did well, high-multitaskers poorly.

They also did some memory tests. Result: "The low multitaskers did great," [researcher] Ophir said. "The high multitaskers were doing worse and worse the further they went along because they kept seeing more letters and had difficulty keeping them sorted in their brains."

Finally, they did a test of concentration and the pattern held.

"Again, the heavy multitaskers underperformed the light multitaskers. 'They couldn't help thinking about the task they weren't doing,' Ophir said. 'The high multitaskers are always drawing from all the information in front of them. They can't keep things separate in their minds.'"

A couple of things about this research:

1. Can we stop now, please, with the edu-gurus' insistence that we break up class activities into 90-second bursts or whatever because "that's how students learn now! They multitask! Their brains are better! They're digital natives! Isn't that great!"? I thought that part of the process of brain maturation and education was training students toward, among other things, developing a longer attention span. You don't expect a 3-year-old to have the same level of absorbed attention for an activity that's not of her choosing as you do for an 18-year-old. I'm not saying that we should go back to the old model of boring students to death just because we can ("It's good for them!"), but it seems to me that adopting a progressive infantilization of students through encouraging multitasking and decreased attention spans isn't in their best interests.


2. It makes me think of the internet information = firehose analogy so popular with librarians and others teaching students how to search. We can teach them good searching techniques to narrow that gush of water/information into a useful stream, but if the "multitasking is good for you" push is training their brains into being unable to avoid the full rush of water, what good are we doing?


3. I put one part of that in bold because I'm guilty of it, too. I hadn't thought that the whole idea of cheating on and procrastinating about one project because you're temporarily far more fascinated by another was an outgrowth of multitasking (I thought it was laziness and procrastination), but maybe it is. Maybe it's the Samuel Taylor Coleridge model (Pantisocracy! Wait--no, poetry!) of writing winning out over the Anthony Trollope one (up at 5:30 a.m., 250 words every 15 minutes or else). On the other hand, maybe Raymond Chandler had the right idea about acknowledging how attention wanders but disciplining it (through boredom) to get back on track.

Learning how to sort, assess, filter, evaluate, and analyze information with the goal of producing intelligent, coherently expressed writing about those thoughts is what we're supposed to be teaching students. At least this study gives some support for considering that a process not necessarily served best by multitasking.

[Called "part 2" because part 1 is here. That one was on a UCLA study. What is it about California that makes its scientists so concerned with increasing attention spans?]

A food post

Historiann had a food post the other day all about food and identity and political significance. This one doesn't have any of those things, except food.

The sun is still warm on my shoulders as I walk out to the garden, but the grass is cool, and there's a nip in the air, since it is, after all, nearly October. The shadows are getting long, too.

I reach down under the broad squash leaves and grab one of the yellow crookneck squashes that are underneath. They're a little prickly, like the leaves, but they're still warm from the sun. I give it a twist and it breaks off from the plant. The prickly parts tamp down when I touch them, but the squash is still warm.

I put the wire colander down on the ground under the tangled tomato plants and start picking. This kind of plant bears tomatoes that are tiny, like currants, and sweet--labor-intensive, but worth it. I push aside the leaves of some of the other plants and pick some different kinds: yellow, pear-shaped cherry tomatoes, orange ones, and one of the big tomatoes that's ripened over the weekend. The tomatoes are warm, too, but they don't hold the heat as the squash does. There are other varieties planted here, but the fruit on them is still a sturdy green with no hint of red. They may not ripen before the frost.

On the way back up the steps to the back door, I bend down and pinch off some basil leaves.

Inside, billows of steam are coming from the stove because the pasta is boiling. I give the contents of the wire colander a quick rinse, cut up the squash and toss it into the boiling water with the pasta for a couple of minutes, chop the basil, drain the pasta and squash, and throw everything into a bowl.

Dinner.

Inside Higher Ed: Libraries of the Future

Speaking of old television programs, there was one called The Honeymooners that has been playing on an infinite repeating loop on one station or another for years. In one of the episodes, the main character, Ralph Kramden, decides to sell an apple peeler or something, and to do this he decides to have his friend Ed Norton help him make a TV commercial in which he plays "Chef of the Future." When I saw the "Libraries of the Future," guess what went through my mind.

These libraries of the future will--surprise!--have no books:

The university library of the future will be sparsely staffed, highly decentralized, and have a physical plant consisting of little more than special collections and study areas. . . . “We're already starting to see a move on the part of university libraries... to outsource virtually all the services [they have] developed and maintained over the years,” Greenstein said.

What's worrisome about this is that the article talks not about managing collections but about "outsourcing" the "storing and managing of books." This sounds like off-site storage, which is okay, maybe, for an obscure book of criticism from the 1930s, but I'm wondering if all books would be stored in this way.

I'm surprised that no one has made the efficiency argument yet about off-site storage. Quick quiz: which of these is more efficient?

1. Faculty member (or student) looks up a book, goes into the stacks, leafs through the book and others in the area, carries books to circulation desk, checks them out, and carries them home.

2. Faculty member looks up a book and sends a request for a book in closed off-site stacks. Library person receives the request and prints it out. Another library person (probably a work-study student) takes the call slip and hunts down the book in the stacks. Two days pass. Circulation desk emails the faculty member. Faculty member goes to the library to pick up the book, decides that she needs another one, and repeats the process.

Oh, and the Chef of the Future? His gadget completely fails.

Words we need to have

Embriskenment: the act of lighting a fire under one's own prose, metaphorically speaking, while editing so that the sentences move along at brisk, lively pace.

Compujudgment: the process by which various computer programs, like RescueTime, Remember the Milk, and Leechblock, gang up on you to judge whether you're being productive or not.

• Bonus points if you actually feel guilty about what the summaries will say at the end of the day about how much time you've wasted.
• Triple points if you can actually see the ghosts of David Allen, Merlin Mann, and Robert Boice hovering over the corners of your monitor like Agents of Doom.

Facebookiania: in-depth knowledge acquired about colleagues' avocations, pets, and favorite bands that crowds out one's knowledge of their research interests.

Folder grooming: the act of cleaning out, sorting, and reordering folders so that writing can begin.

• Bonus points if the folders have any relationship to the project at hand.

Others?

5-minute conference presentations--and spin some plates while you're at it

Back in the days of variety shows, there used to be some guy whose whole act was setting up poles and spinning plates on top of them, usually to Khachaturian's "Sabre Dance." (I've seen it parodied in movies like That Thing You Do.)

Now Henry Farrell wants to give academics--well, political scientists, anyway--about the same amount of time for their conference presentations:

Mr. Farrell, an associate professor of political science at George Washington University, uses a blog post for The Monkey Cage to call for a system that would keep presentations at the American Political Science Association moving along—and that would cut them off after five minutes, or perhaps 10 as a compromise.

To ensure that everyone stays within the time, he's not going to use the much-ignored red and green lights that MLA has used. Instead, he wants to use Ignite, a kind of software that makes PowerPoint slides change automatically every 15 seconds. If you only get 20 slides as a maximum length for your presentation--well, you do the math.

Of course, most of us in the humanities have papers rather than PowerPoints at conferences. I've heard roundtables with this 5-minute format, too, although a lot of times people go over those limits. Would this work for a real conference presentation in which an argument had to be developed, supported, and advanced, though?

The spinning plates association came up because I was imagining presenters in the humanities trying to time their talks according to the inexorably advancing slides, keeping all those ideas in the air as they raced frantically through their material. Add a little Khachaturian to a presentation like that, and you've got yourself a YouTube sensation!

College for $99 a Month

From Washington Monthly, via Edge of the American West.

The article is about Straighterline, a for-big-profits educational company. The principle is simple and is the brainchild of a man named Burck Smith--who went to Williams and Harvard, by the way, not the University of Phoenix or another online school. Here it is: charge very low tuition and make it possible for people like the 50-year-old laid-off worker Barbara Solvig (whose story is the "hook" in the article) to complete her education. The idea is that the basic Econ 101, English 101, etc. will be offered online, thus skimming off tremendous profits for Smith and his investors. Oh, and it's all for noble motives:

Students will benefit enormously from radically lower prices—particularly people like Solvig who lack disposable income and need higher learning to compete in an ever-more treacherous economy.

But is Smarthinking, the tutoring company that Burck founded, likely to hire a 50-something American worker like Solvig in this "treacherous economy," given industry's hatred for those over 30? Is it likely to employ unemployed or underemployed Ph.D. grads or ABDs in the U.S.? Of course not.

Smarthinking pooled the demand from hundreds of colleges and tens of thousands of students while hiring credentialed tutors in places like India and the Philippines. As long as “on demand” was defined as a high likelihood of being served within a few minutes, economies of scale and cheap foreign labor could be combined to drive per-student service costs to unheard-of lows.

Let's leave aside the humanities, culture, and research for a minute, just as Smith's model will leave them aside permanently, and look at something more basic: how are these online courses going to teach people to draw blood and insert catheters, not to mention even more knowledge- and skill-based practices? If you want to be an R.N., how will you learn these things?

What's that you say? That's not the job of an online course? All right, but the courses that do teach such things are expensive. They're time-consuming. They require hands-on teaching with skilled practitioners.

Dean Dad has talked about how expensive it is to train nurses, and what pays for those expensive specialized courses? The lower-division ones that Smith is proposing to take over and teach for $99 a month. How long do you think that universities are going to continue teaching money-losing but vitally important courses if they don't have a means to balance the loss of income in some way?

Thoughts?

Think things were better in the olden days? Think again.

I've been reading The Autobiography of William Lyon Phelps (1939), and while it does have some sigh-worthy features (such as having colleges like Yale and Harvard call him up and, in effect, start a bidding war to have him come and teach there . . . when he was an instructor), it also has a few tidbits that should give one pause.* Here are some excerpts from 1891-2 and a few years later. A lot has changed--but then again, a lot hasn't:

"In the early Spring, obsessed by the work I was doing on my Doctor's thesis and by the fear that I should not finish it in time, I became afflicted with insomnia" (258). A faculty member tells him that he has already done enough to be worthy of a degree and that he can polish it up later, thus helping Phelps to avoid "a complete and prolonged breakdown."

In those days, Harvard had a composition requirement for freshman, sophomores, and some juniors in which a daily theme was required, which Phelps regarded as an unnecessary compulsory exercise: "The only men on the Harvard English Faculty who were excused from reading themes were Professor Child and Professor Kittredge. . . One day I met [Professor Child]in the Yard, and he asked me what I was doing; I replied, 'Reading themes.' He looked at me affectionately and said, 'Don't spoil your youth'" (274).

"During the entire academic year at Harvard, I read more than eight hundred themes every week; I read all day and a good part of the night. Once I was sick for two days, and a substitute read for me, because even one day's lapse made it impossible to keep up" (274).

"There is no doubt that in those days (1880-1900) popularity with the students was a serious handicap . . . [because] extreme popularity made the ruling powers feel that the candidate must have stooped to conquer. Professor Sumner used to say it was often easier for a man from another college to receive an appointment than for a man on the ground; 'the latter's faults we know, and all we know of the distant man is that he has faults, but as we do not know what they are, we forget their certain existence'" (287).

A few years later, at Yale, Phelps decides to teach "the first course in any university in the world confined wholly to contemporary fiction. I called the course Modern Novels." This "amazing addition to the curriculum" (298) inspired all kinds of ridicule in the newspapers, usually under the headline "THEY STUDY NOVELS."

"I well remember also [Professor Lounsbury's] saying to me over and over again, and always with emphasis, that it was ridiculous to judge the value of a college professor by what his students thought of him. They were not qualified to judge. It was only what other professors thought of him that should count; for they were his peers" (324).


*(You see how contagious Phelps's style is?)

Another Starbucks Memorial Library

From the Chronicle's "Is it a Library? A Student Center?" (behind the subscription wall--sorry). This one's at Goucher College:

Any new library building will have hissing espresso machines, padded chairs, and noisy study areas. But what does one make of a library with an art gallery, a restaurant, and open forum space that can seat at least 700 people? How about treadmills, exercise bikes, and rowing machines as well?

. . . Among those attractions, on a balcony overlooking the forum, is the exercise equipment—ellipticals, bikes, rowing machines. "We'll see how much they are used," Mr. Ungar says. "It's a gamble—something I insisted on, because I think that if we are going to have a place where you can do everything, exercise should be part of it."

There is also a studio for the campus radio station, classrooms, a commuter lounge with a full kitchen, a unisex bathroom with a shower, along with all of the usual trappings of a traditional library: circulation and reference desks, study spaces, computer labs, and a prominent space for the display and preservation of special collections.

Ah, yes--nothing says the vita contemplativa like the sight of sweating bodies on a treadmill. It's interesting that a mega-espresso machine is mandatory for new libraries but books are more or less optional, just one sideshow "attraction" among the rest. But at least this one does have books:

The stacks are one of the first things people see when approaching the building from the road, with the candy-colored shelves—blue, yellow, red—and quiet study areas clearly visible inside. It's an intentional placement, meant to signal that books still hold a prominent place in the building, despite all the other attractions.

On the other hand, this does kill two birds with one stone: instead of a brisk walk outside to wake you up when you get all dozy reading in the stacks, you can get on a treadmill and get the brain cells moving again, or refuel with industrial-strength coffee.

The same, but different

Dispatches from the same routine in a different place.

I love watching students walking along campus paths and reading, standing in food lines and reading, and sitting on benches in the sun and reading. I've seen a few students texting and walking, but more of them are reading books and walking. That's somehow reassuring: they apparently didn't get the "death of reading" memos that the media churns out hourly.

I especially love watching them because I'm on a strange campus and none of them are my students. Don't get me wrong--I love my students--but it's nice to be on a campus that's not your campus, since if you're on your own campus, people expect you to go to meetings and do other things incompatible with writing.

I'd forgotten how much I like working in a library and how much I get done in that atmosphere of enforced academic monasticism. Even with the clatter of work-study students moving books around, it's still a peaceful place.

When it's time for a break, I have a choice: there's fresh air and sunshine right outside the door, and there are stacks full of old and strange books to pick off the shelves and leaf through. The best ones are those that have a host of jokes and references that were clearly popular in, say, 1870 but are really obscure today (or should I say "to-day"?). That's the shorthand of a culture, recorded in texts in which the authors didn't even think that that's what they were writing. Who needs cryptological-anthropological mysteries when there's one lying right there on the library shelf waiting for someone to discover it?

Only of interest to writers

For the next few days, I'll be in a different place (literally) and am trying to get to a different place figuratively with my writing. New library--new surroundings--new city (I'm tagging along at a conference not in my discipline)--and, I hope, new energy. I've left most of the books behind--that's what libraries are for--and am going to write out of what I know and add the citations later. This is an old trick that I've used before, but someone posted about it recently (Notorious PhD, maybe?), and it's time to pull that rabbit out of the hat again.

The trouble with a routine is that it becomes . . . routine. As you get tired of thinking your way through some of the ideas, you search for distractions, and if there are blog controversies going on (like the ones at Historiann's and Dr. Crazy's and profgrrrl's), you get all invested in that instead of in your work. These were interesting posts, of course, as were all the responses and comments, but if you're in a routine, that's the trouble. You think about that in the shower instead of about what you'll be writing that day, and that's not good.

So I won't be weighing in on any controversies, or have anything new to say about job letters, or teaching, or how everyone wants to kill the libraries. I won't be writing any new posts about what are apparently favorite topics here, judging from search results: human hibernation and capturing stills from a DVD. But if I see interesting things that I can post about without giving away too much about the location, I'll do it.

Goal for the week: some IRL writing and, here on the blog, some 30-second diversions for writers that you won't tax your brain about after you read them.

Boston Globe: A library without the books

From the Boston Globe, with some interruptions by me.

Cushing Academy (yearly tuition: $42,850) is getting rid of its books:

“When I look at books, I see an outdated technology, like scrolls before books,’’ said James Tracy, headmaster of Cushing and chief promoter of the bookless campus. . . . We’re not discouraging students from reading. We see this as a natural way to shape emerging trends and optimize technology.’’

And learn to spout clichéd language like "shape emerging trends and optimize technology"?

Instead of a library, the academy is spending nearly $500,000 to create a “learning center,’’ though that is only one of the names in contention for the new space. In place of the stacks, they are spending $42,000 on three large flat-screen TVs that will project data from the Internet and $20,000 on special laptop-friendly study carrels. Where the reference desk was, they are building a $50,000 coffee shop that will include a $12,000 cappuccino machine.

I know how Cushing Academy can save $500,000: put in a Starbucks instead. What's the difference? And that way they won't have to train the erstwhile "information specialists" to be baristas, too.

Tracy and other administrators said the books took up too much space and that there was nowhere else on campus to stock them. So they decided to give their collection - aside from a few hundred children’s books and valuable antiquarian works - to local schools and libraries.

“We see the gain as greater than the loss,’’ said Gisele Zangari, chairwoman of the math department, who like other teachers has plans for all her students to do their class reading on electronic books by next year. “This is the start of a new era.’’

And students mark up these books how, exactly? But not everyone is happy with the Brave New World:

“Unless every student has a Kindle and an unlimited budget, I don’t see how that need is going to be met,’’ Fiels said. “Books are not a waste of space, and they won’t be until a digital book can tolerate as much sand, survive a coffee spill, and have unlimited power."

So far we agree. But wait--there's more:

"When that happens, there will be next to no difference between that and a book.’’

Here's a test: Anyone out there still have a book on a 5 1/4" floppy disk, suitable for reading in the drive on your x286 processor Windows 3.1 system computer? How about a book on a 3" misnamed "floppy disk" or a Zip disk? Still have them? I do. How often do you read them? Daily? Weekly? Never?

How often do you read from books on paper that are over 100 years old? Daily? Weekly? More than you read the books on computer disks?

But of course reading old books on paper doesn't "shape emerging trends" or "prioritize the ramfoozle" or whatever the currently fashionable phrase is.

I know I've ranted about this before. But this is something that deserves a rant every time.

Microsoft and Blackboard

Joshua Kim has an article up at Inside Higher Ed called "5 Reasons Microsoft Will Buy Blackboard." Below are Kim's points, with thoughts (some real, some irreverent).

"1. The education market will continue to grow and is an important sector for a technology and platform company to have a presence." Kim is right: if it has to do with computers and making money through subscriptions, Microsoft wants a piece of it. Also, education is one of the sectors where Apple is still a significant presence, and the Lords of Redmond may want to chip away at that.

"2. Buying Blackboard will instantly address the problem of Microsoft loosing relevance in higher education." Kim mentions the threat posed by Google, but it's going to be hard to fight Google's "free" service with Microsoft subscription fees, even if Word can put squiggly red lines under errors like "loosing."

"3. The CMS market will evolve towards the cloud." But how would we know we were using Blackboard, if the endearingly glacial pace at which it works is gone? When are we going to go and get cups of tea, if not when we click on a page in BB, wander away to put the kettle on while it loads, and then come back once it's finally there? Seriously, the cloud concept could speed things up, and that's a good thing.

"4. Microsoft could improve the Blackboard experience by bundling in cloud based services such as personal storage, robust presence awareness and collaboration, and integrated calendaring, messaging and e-mail." Yes, these would be improvements, but I'm thinking Microsoft isn't going to give these away for free. If students have to pay for some flavor of Microsoft AND fees for using Blackboard, I can see instructors turning away from this model because it'll be just too expensive for students. Or if Microsoft bundles in its features to create a new Blackboard on steroids (Microboard? Blacksoft?), does anyone want to place a bet that the extra cost won't be bundled in along with the features? Kim mentions that this would improve Blackboard's terrible search feature (one can only hope), but this would probably occur at the cost of having more things sewn up in back of subscription walls and away from what students can actually see. That's frustrating.

"5. Education is an important core value for the Microsoft culture." It's true, and Kim goes on to say this: "Think of the depth of educational content that Microsoft could capture, share, and distribute in conjunction with a cloud based Blackboard sitting on a universal database of learning materials." This would work well for Microsoft certification programs, but applying it to the liberal arts? We're back in Edupunk-land again. Also, "capture, share, and distribute"? Does this mean "steal currently freely available or public domain content, tie it up behind a subscription wall, and charge for it?" I think we've seen this happen before.

I also wonder if this hypothetical alliance is coming about 5-10 years too late. A lot of faculty have migrated either to really good work-arounds for online class work (Google docs, wikis, blogs, etc.) that are preferable because they're customizable or solutions like Moodle.

Here are the answers. You guess the questions.

Invent your own questions. (Hint: One of these is meant to be delivered in a heavily sarcastic tone.)

1. Not as productive as I'd hoped, and I haven't done nearly enough writing yet, but I'm working on it.

2. I hadn't planned on coming to campus on that date, but--. Wait. No, I'm not coming in on that date.

3. I haven't sent that yet, but it's almost done.

4. As a matter of fact, I haven't had a lot of time to read that book or any of its sequels.

5. No, I haven't made up the syllabus yet for the course that starts in January.

6. Sure. It's just one long series of days spent lying in the hammock with a glass of lemonade, what with all the sabbatical time off.