On writing: dither and blather

Over at The Chronicle, The Shadow Scholar has been getting more than his 15 minutes of fame for cheerfully admitting that he makes a good living at writing papers--nay, theses and dissertations--for students willing to pay his prices. Everyone in the comments is shocked and outraged by his admission and his lack of ethics, but I was sort of struck with awe at this: "It's not implausible to write a 75-page paper in two days. It's just miserable. I don't need much sleep, and when I get cranking, I can churn out four or five pages an hour."

Wow. Is it possible to write 75 pages in two days?

I've concluded that there are really two parts to the actual writing process (not the editing process, which is also part of a larger writing process). These are Getting Started and Keeping At It. Keeping At It is not hard. Getting Started is misery.

When I've asked highly productive colleagues and friends how they get started, sometimes they seem confused ("What is this Getting Started of which you speak?" their expressions say) and sometimes they say, "Well, I get up and start reading things, and then I start writing." None of them mention the Dither Period, which unfortunately seems somehow essential to the Getting Started process for me.

The Dither Period is that time period when you know you should be writing but can't manage it. You sit at the desk and leap up as if you're on a hot stove. You've already cut down all distractions--no internet, no going to the store or seeing friends, no cleaning binges--so on top of everything else, the Dither Period is boring. You think about the work, read a little, wander around the house, sit down, leap up, and wander some more. Finally, you can't stand it any more and you sit down, write the word count on a pad of paper (an ignominious "0," but you have to start somewhere), set the timer for 20 or 30 or 50 minutes, and get going. Now you're in the Getting Started mode.

Actually, you're in Blather mode. You just write things down based on what you know and think, making side notes when you have to. Your quotations look like this: "Put down that quote where he says this--I think it's in X book." When the timer rings, you write down your word count, because in Blather mode, every word does count. Maybe you set little goals for yourself about how much you'll write before the next timer period. And so on.

At the end, you'll have words. They may not be what you want, or they may turn out to be all right after all. The important thing is that you've created something you can work with--a Blather fabric--that you can then cut and stitch into something worthwhile.

But 75 pages over a two-day period? I don't think that even Blather mode could produce that much.

Happy Thanksgiving!

• Warm pumpkin custard (left over from the pies and baked in a dish) for dessert last night with excellent sharp cheese.
  
• Pumpkin custard with sharp cheese and icy cold apple cider for breakfast.
• Fresh thyme, dug out from under the snow, for roasting the turkey.
  
• The smell of turkey roasting all day long.
• Skyping/calling/Google videoing with various family members, and the guilt-free knowledge that we're too far away to have to navigate slippery roads or endure the warm embrace of a TSA agent to see them.

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone!

Syllabus hero

The other day over at University Diaries, Margaret Soltan said (or linked to someone who said) that laptops were becoming more scarce in classes these days. Is this true? I'm not teaching classes right now where this is an issue, so I'm curious: are we on the downside of the laptop-using curve? Are the Facebook-checking students having to delay gratification for 50 minutes until the class is over? (I know, I know--some students take notes with their laptops. Some get 8 hours of sleep a night, write their papers months in advance, call their parents every week, and spend the rest of their time studying, but can we agree that not everyone does this?)

Second question: Is this the result of teachers banning laptops?

I was thinking about this because in looking up syllabi around the web the other day, I came across a few by instructors that ought to be called syllabus heroes. Syllabus heroes are the people who make policies that make mine look timid. Their syllabi include statements like these:

• No laptops. No exceptions.
• Texting in class = be asked to leave.
• Turn off your cell phone. If it rings, everyone in the class loses participation points for the day. (I made that one up, but what I saw was similar.)
• Be disruptive in class, and everyone in the class has to take a pop quiz.
  

The statements make no apologies and no explanations; they just state the facts.

And banning laptops? Can we even do that? Would it hold up if someone went to the Chair or Dean and argued that we were destroying their ability to learn and will to live?

A flash of insight

Right now the secondary narrative of my life is this St. George and the Dragon relationship I'm having with the online instruction people. Hint: I am St. George in this scenario, and I really am more amused than irritated. Note: We are supposed to be able to teach these courses as we wish to teach them, so I'm not violating any principles in wanting to change things.

The Dragon has wanted meetings. I have had meetings. Lots of meetings.

The Dragon wants me to maintain the course structure as far as folder structures and so on in the labyrinthine course space. Sure. Fine. Whatever.

The Dragon wants me to change nothing about the course, including adding assignments or changing the grading plan. I disagree.

The Dragon wants me to link to nothing beyond the world of the course. Uh, that would be a big negative on that one.

The Dragon wants me to give it my materials now so that I have no control over them and cannot change them for 8 weeks. I don't even have the desk copies yet. Nope.

Now, I'm sure that the Dragon really does think it knows best and is being very helpful, but its #1 concern is that nothing change, ever. My #1 concern is to give the students the best possible online experience and education that I can give them, based on what I know from previous online teaching experiences and, oh, by the way, being a professional in the field of literary studies for a goodly amount of time.

Here's the insight that caused me to put the sword away and stop instigating contact: I have the power to change things in the course space without asking anyone about it. I'm not going to violate any meaningful rules or principles (folder structure), but if I change something and they don't like it, they're going to have to come to me about the issue.

This is a whole different dragon-slaying contest from what I was doing, which was explaining what I wanted to do and then having them respond, "But that would change an assignment, wouldn't it?"

I just got contacted for yet another introductory meeting but was warned by the Dragon representative that ze was very busy and zir time was limited. With my new insight, I replied that I would only be available on a certain date during a 3-hour block of time for a meeting and cheerily concluded that ze should let me know if ze wanted to schedule a meeting.

Insight! It's a wonderful thing.

Two links in defense of the humanities

Michael Berube, over at Crooked Timber, dismantles the idea that the humanities have been declining as a major: http://crookedtimber.org/2010/11/16/breaking-news-humanities-in-decline-film-at-11/.

And Gregory A. Petsko, at Genome Biology, responds to SUNY Albany's purge of its language departments by providing an eloquent defense of the humanities from a scientist's perspective. http://genomebiology.com/2010/11/10/138. A sample:

But universities aren't just about discovering and capitalizing on new knowledge; they are also about preserving knowledge from being lost over time, and that requires a financial investment. There is good reason for it: what seems to be archaic today can become vital in the future. I'll give you two examples of that. The first is the science of virology, which in the 1970s was dying out because people felt that infectious diseases were no longer a serious health problem in the developed world and other subjects, such as molecular biology, were much sexier. Then, in the early 1990s, a little problem called AIDS became the world's number 1 health concern. The virus that causes AIDS was first isolated and characterized at the National Institutes of Health in the USA and the Institute Pasteur in France, because these were among the few institutions that still had thriving virology programs. My second example you will probably be more familiar with. Middle Eastern Studies, including the study of foreign languages such as Arabic and Persian, was hardly a hot subject on most campuses in the 1990s. Then came September 11, 2001. Suddenly we realized that we needed a lot more people who understood something about that part of the world, especially its Muslim culture. Those universities that had preserved their Middle Eastern Studies departments, even in the face of declining enrollment, suddenly became very important places. Those that hadn't - well, I'm sure you get the picture.

Random bullets of gray November

• Here's a question: if the monograph is in trouble, dying, hard to publish, etc., then why does seemingly every presenter at a conference have a new book either just out or just coming out (or, in a bid to make the audience truly envious, both)?
  
• I think we ought to have an award patch for our blog sidebars that says something like "I survived my meeting with the Center for Teaching Awesomeness/Course Management System Gurus." These are often a requirement for getting access to modify the course no matter how much you've done in online in the past, so I kept my words to a minimum and my temper under wraps. On the 30th or so time I was told emphatically not to do something that usually works well because it would mess up their system of teaching for future people teaching the course, I finally said, "I don't really care about who teaches the course after me. Can't you just archive the course as it is now and put that one back in for the next person?" Archiving a course goes back to about 1999 in Blackboard if not earlier, so I think they could manage it. They said they'd look into it.*
• Why is it that budgets for Centers for Teaching Awesomeness never get cut, but budgets for paying fine teachers are being cut all over the place?
• I also plan to start a movement for the Abolition of Mayonnaise on Fast Food Sandwiches as a Default Option. Because of commuting and what's available, I have to eat at one of these places on some days and always order "no mayonnaise," something that gets ignored about half the time. When did mayonnaise become de rigueur on burgers,* anyway, and does anyone really need it who couldn't ask for it? (I told you these were random bullets.)

*Edited to add: An online course in which I am not permitted to add ANY external links seems to miss the point of online education, don't you think?

(** at least those with lettuce and tomatoes, which seem to trigger a mayonnaise auto-response.)

Still here, just busy

Still here--just busy--will post later.

Online learning: the rock star tour

Over at The Chronicle, there's a special section on Online Learning. Some of the writers are all about "education should be free! cheap!"--but you'll have to take my word for it. Most of the section is behind the subscription wall. (Cue ironic Colbertian raising of one eyebrow here.)

A lot of it is stuff that bloggers have been talking about for a long time: don't use a technology unless there's a pedagogical reason for it. Lots of information is available online. Prepping and teaching an online course takes longer. These are all good ideas, and the articles are good, but you get the drift.

But I was fascinated by the commentary by Dalton Conley, vice provost and dean of the social sciences and a professor of sociology at New York University, who is out to sell a book (also not free). His piece is "Steal This Education: Abbie Hoffman said a revolutionary's first duty was to get away with it. Now you can." It's the old Abbie Hoffman "steal this book" argument, although I'm surprised he didn't bring up Matt Damon's speech in Good Will Hunting that says the same thing.

After Conley rehearses the same old, same old about how no one ever changes a lecture in 10 years and how useless it is to lecture in front of a class, he has this to say:

By freeing me from standing before 200 students to teach "Introduction to Sociology" each fall, the new project will allow me to spend some time at our study-abroad site in Florence for a weeklong workshop, then visit our Abu Dhabi campus, and perhaps stop at NYU in Shanghai for a third workshop before heading back to my curates in New York.

In short, it's online learning as a rock star tour.

Now what I want to know is this:
1. Does he have a concert rider that prohibits green M&Ms and specifies a pool table backstage at every concert?
2. Who grades all those papers?
3. "Curates"? What is he, the Pope?
4. Who pays for all that travel? NYU must be a rare, blessed island of academe with no money troubles.

More seriously, think about it this way: if teachers are indeed like rock stars where short bursts of impersonal attention will suffice, then maybe he's right. After all, wouldn't that put education on the model of listening to music at home and then going to the occasional concert? Why do people go to concerts, anyway, if they can get the music at home? Isn't it to share an experience? Doesn't the fact that the person is in the room make any difference?

But what if you're one of those students in a large lecture that wants to walk down the stairs and speak to him after class? Do you then say "Wow, I can't wait to ask him this question when he's here on April 25?" Or do you just email him and get a curatorial reply?

Thoughts?

[Edited to add: If you're going to do online education and build the university's brand, this would be a good way to do it, I guess. I just took exception to the idea that it was necessarily a better way than being there in person.]

Get happy

There's a lot of talk about salaries in the profession around the blogosphere right now. Tenured Radical has some posts about it. Dr. Crazy, Roxie's World, and Historiann have good posts about the problem, too, as does squadratomagico, although hers is a very different perspective.

Given the talks happening all over about how we can best implement the English Department of the Future and hearing from friends of friends about tenured people being let go because of financial exigency, I'm not sanguine about the possibility of change. Not sanguine? That's putting it mildly. Actually, TR's post depressed the living daylights out of me for a few days because it revealed just how low my salary is by comparison.

TR suggests forming a union or joining AAUP, but as Dr. Crazy says,

And I’ll tell you: I get irritable when people talk about unionizing as if it’s the answer to any of the above problems, because that’s not a model that is likely to have any traction in my state, and so when people hold up unions as the answer, I feel like they are closing their eyes to my working conditions and the realities of my location, applying a solution that would work for them in a one-size-fits-all sort of way that certainly isn’t going to fit where I live and work.

In the present economic climate at my university, taking steps toward a higher salary would be like saying "I'm going to hold my breath until I turn blue unless you give me a unicorn." See, nobody's got a unicorn right now, and increasingly they don't have jobs, either. You're welcome to turn blue all you want; it's not going to change the budget numbers.

I don't have any answers, but a little Judy Garland might help to lift our collective spirits:

"Reliably unreliable"--a good way to look at it

Over at Profhacker, Nels Highberg has an interesting post about being what he calls "reliably unreliable" when answering email.

I know what it’s like to have a student email me at 12:17 AM with a question about an essay due that same day at 9:30 AM, and then they complain that I was unresponsive. I know what it’s like to have a colleague call my office and leave a voicemail on Friday after 5:00 PM asking me to take care of something before a workshop set to start the next day at 8:30 AM (a workshop I am only supposed to attend and not help coordinate), and then they express shock that I chose to walk from the parking lot to the workshop and bypass my office, missing their request entirely. In such cases, I no longer feel bad.

Count me in on the "reliably unreliable" club, Nels. First of all, the student is going to complain if you respond at any time later than 12:18, because a student writing at that hour wants an answer now, so it's pointless to indulge that kind of behavior, unless you're awake and feel like answering. And if a colleague leaves a message on an office voicemail over the weekend and expects an answer (voicemail? really?) before the weekend is over, an "Are you serious?" is the best response he or she can expect.

Why wouldn't you answer an email right away, if you've read it?

1. Because it teaches everyone (not just students) unrealistic expectations about instantaneous responses. It's not always, or even mostly, students who demand this kind of attention.
   
2. Because if, say, someone in your department has initiated some kind of discussion over the weekend, then you're hooked into the conversation: if you give them one response, they'll want you to continue to engage in the discussion. There is no departmental discussion so gripping that it can't wait until Monday, and if there is, you don't want to be part of it. No good will come of it.
   
3. Because you ought at least to pretend that you have a life and are not hanging out waiting for people to shovel work into your lap on the weekend.
   

This goes double for long, involved emails. "E-Mail Auto Response" at the New Yorker has this one just about right:

Please note that if your e-mail is more than three (3) sentences in length I have read the first three (3) sentences, skimmed the opening paragraph, and sort of eyeballed the rest of it. Please do not expect a response to your e-mail anytime soon, if at all, for I am not a mind reader, and therefore cannot guess the nature of anything beyond the first three (3) sentences.

For me, it depends on a few things, though not all at once:

1. Is it short enough to answer quickly? Is it going to require that I look something up or otherwise compose something more elaborate than a sentence or two?
   
2. Is it going to nag at the back of my mind if I don't answer it? Is it faster to answer the email than to think about it? (Zeigarnik effect: if you take care of it, you can forget it faster.)
   
3. Do I get to check something off my to-do list by answering it?
4. Is it respectfully phrased, logical, etc.? If it shows that the writer has an attitude problem (rudeness), then it goes to the bottom of the pile for response when I get around to it, which will probably be never.

So do you take your time answering emails?

E-textbooks (again): students prefer dead tree versions

At the New York Times, Lisa Forderaro expresses surprise that the students at Hamilton College prefer print textbooks to the digital kind (which, she notes correctly, you "rent" instead of buying). Why do the students prefer paper to screens?

• “The screen won’t go blank,” said Faton Begolli, a sophomore from Boston. “There can’t be a virus. It wouldn’t be the same without books. They’ve defined ‘academia’ for a thousand years.”
• “Last semester, I rented for psychology, and it was cheaper. But for something like organic chemistry, I need to keep the book. E-textbooks are good, but it’s tempting to go on Facebook, and it can strain your eyes.”

These seem like sensible answers to me. If even twenty-somethings are feeling eyestrain, that's good to know.

Also, as Forderaro says, "Many students are reluctant to give up the ability to flip quickly between chapters, write in the margins and highlight passages, although new software applications are beginning to allow students to use e-textbooks that way." This doesn't seem to dissuade the digital true believer, though:

“Students grew up learning from print books,” said Nicole Allen, the textbooks campaign director for the research groups, “so as they transition to higher education, it’s not surprising that they carry a preference for a format that they are most accustomed to.”

This is true but not true, and, paired with the idea about writing in margins, flipping through the books, etc., suggests that students are somehow not thinking clearly but clinging blindly to an old tool.

Hold on a minute. Aren't students the people most likely to try out a new format and discard the old one if they decide it's more useful, and haven't they done this repeatedly with various technologies and practices, right down to the sophisticated methods of plagiarism that we all complain about? Except for the comment about books defining academia, which shows a quite admirable sentiment, all of the objections have nothing to do with "don't want to change what I'm used to" and everything to do with "the e-textbooks just don't work as well for me."

I don't think they're being resistant. I think they're making a rational choice about what works best for them.

The line of reasoning that considers resistance to using a particular technology as a particular kind of obstinacy reminds of other experiments (not to mention the hilarious Professor Pushbutton machine that Historiann found). Does Duke still give out iPods to its freshman class? Is Reed College continuing with its KindleDX program?

I'm not saying that we shouldn't experiment with these technologies; we should, and we should keep trying. But we should also be willing to see that if they don't work well, it's not a statement about resistance to technology but about using the appropriate tool for the job.

Blogs of ages past

The decision of the BitchPhD bloggers and BitchPhD herself to close up shop has a number of current bloggers like Roxie's World and Dr. Crazy and AnnieEm thinking about blogs that have shut down and the nature of blogging. (AnnieEm says that Berube's quitting, too, but he quit before for a year or two and then came back, so here's hoping.)

Like the moms at Roxie's World, I used to read BitchPhD in the early days when it seemed like one earnest, passionate voice, and I sort of trailed off when it became a group blog, not because the group bloggers were less earnest but because I missed that original voice. If I think about what draws me into reading blogs, it's the voice of the blogger.

Now, at BitchPhD, I found a lot of good stuff, although sometimes I felt as though I were being told the One Best Way to be a feminist. Sometimes I agreed, and sometimes I didn't. But that's the point, with a blog: if a blogger doesn't care about what he or she is writing, what's the point of blogging? I'm not talking about writers' blogs that are really press releases (here's my itinerary for the latest press junket, and here's a picture of my book with a convenient link), but blogs written primarily not for commercial purposes. You can disagree, but you don't doubt that the person cares.

There are a lot of great new blogs now (see blogroll!), but I'm thinking of blogs that have shut down over the past few years whose voices I miss. Mel at In Favor of Thinking would be one, especially her post on grading championships. MaggieMay (and her stories) would be one, and JustTenured would be another. Dr. Brazen Hussy just shut down recently, which leaves entirely open the Angry Bird Banding section of the blogosphere, among other things. There are others, too, whose blog titles I can't remember but whose voices I can.

I guess if this were a banquet, I'd raise a virtual glass to those bloggers.

iPad as classroom text reader: a thought experiment

As I've done more reading on the iPad, I've wondered what it might be like to use it in a literature classroom. I'm inspired partly by the posts over at Teaching, Learning, and Living with an iPad, a site that's chronicling a writing class in which all the students received iPads. Some thoughts:

• Reading on the iPad is nice. It hasn't been hard on the eyes, and the page-turning capabilities are a lot faster than those on the Kindles I've seen. Like the Kindle, it has a dictionary function, a notes function, etc.
• As it currently exists, the iPad has one advantage over a standard netbook or laptop if you use it in the classroom: no multitasking. Wait--that really is a feature and not a bug, since students wouldn't be able to Facebook while you're hoping they're following the text. That feature will disappear with the next system update, however.
• The down side is that students wouldn't be able to keep a text open and write their notes beside the text, which in an ideal world they would be doing instead of Facebooking.
• The book situation wouldn't work as it does for the tech writing class. First, in testing various e-textbooks over this past year, I learned you don't "buy" an e-textbook in the sense that you keep it permanently (or sell it back to the bookstore); you rent it for a specific period of time, usually one semester or maybe 6 months. This costs about 80% of what it would cost to buy the book. This isn't necessarily good or bad, but since lit students, unlike students in the sciences or tech writing, may want to keep their books for later reference, buying an e-textbook wouldn't make sense unless you're teaching a contemporary author whose works are under copyright.
  
• The good part about an e-textbook is that it's designed for use in a class and has navigation features like a table of contents with links, which would make navigating to specific sections easier.
  
• The good part about not using an e-textbook is that, if you're teaching a pre-1923 literature class, you'd have lots of public domain choices for texts. If you're using a text that doesn't have significant problems with/variations in editions, Project Gutenberg has lots of works formatted for Kindle, which would work on an iPad.
  
• These books wouldn't have the navigation features of a purchased e-textbook, however, and here's where mcconeghy's response to a previous post might provide a solution. Imagine that you're in class. Maybe you'd usually say something like, "Turn to page 127. How has Dorothea Brooke's perspective changed since her comment on page 45?" and you'd expect the students to be able to flip back and forth between the two. Since it'd take a while to do that on an iPad, and there aren't any page numbers anyway, couldn't you say "search for 'red bows on blue dress'" or something like that to get students to find both instances of the phrase? Couldn't the search function replace the flipping pages function?
  
• I'm a good typist, and I have small hands, but the iPad keyboard is still a challenge. It might be a challenge for students as well--any thoughts?
  
• Also, as a sad testament to the increasing irrelevance of the apostrophe, the iPad has put it on the numbers keyboard, so you have shift to that keyboard if you want to use a contraction or a possessive form. It could be that students would get faster at shifting between keyboards, or it could be that we all will start using no contractions at all and talking like Mafia dons ("I do not think he would like to sleep with the fishes"), or--best guess--R.I.P. apostrophes.[Edited to add this: Emily says in the comments that an iPod touch automatically adds the apostrophe. I just checked, and the iPad does, too. Thanks, Emily!]
  

Thoughts?

[Edited to add: I realize, too, that the whole thing would be easier just using a paper book. There should be a universal rule: whenever you have to use the concept of a workaround, the original method of using the tool/technology is probably better in the first place.]

A silver lining, of sorts

Although we hear that the recession is over for the bankers and those on Wall Street (or did I repeat myself?), most universities are going through various kinds of cuts, budget crises, and meetings designed to achieve what our friends at Roxie's World have so aptly called "excellence without money." SUNY Albany's recent dismemberment of its foreign language and classics department shows evidence of this attitude--see IHE and Dame Eleanor Hull's post on that-- although I'd like to know how it intends to keep R1 status without those departments. Isn't "doctoral comprehensive" meant to mean, well, inclusive of humanities?

Universities often think that humanities can achieve this better than other areas of the university, or so the distribution of cuts would indicate. I'd like to think this is because the administrators of universities think that humanities people are so devilishly clever that the cuts don't matter since we can work around them, but it's probably more that they believe that the humanities don't matter.

Anyway. My university, Northern Clime, is going through various conversations about cutbacks, and what has impressed me most is the way in which the faculty members in my department have been pulling together. Their suggestions have been generous, flexible, and ingenious about the budget realities we're facing. No one's drawing a line in the sand and saying "you can't touch my courses/area" or "we don't really need your area, so how about if we cut that?" or "your requirements are flexible, but mine can't be changed." When there are meetings, there's very little whining or retrospectives about "when I first came here, we could do X and Y and now we can't."

The process of planning is still demoralizing, but it's much less so because of the good humor and flexibility of my colleagues. Don't call me Pollyanna, the Glad Girl: No one would wish for the terrible budget situation, but if it's here--and it is--the silver lining is that it shows something in us that we might not otherwise have seen.

I wonder if this budget crisis is bringing this collegiality out in other places.

Random bullets at midweek

• How much do you remember about a book (criticism, not fiction) a few years after you've read it? After you've skimmed it?
• Do you remember the general subject? The argument? Examples?
  
• How embarrassed are you if a few years later, a student is reading the book because you said it was good and asks you about the argument--and you can't remember? (My answer: sort of embarrassed, but not as much as I'd have been some years ago.)
• You know all those writing techniques that say to get at the writing in the morning, putting everything else aside, and then stop? Well, I've gotten a piece just about finished, but the trouble is that I don't want to stop. It's like chips: you can't eat just one.
• Speaking of chips, how pampered are Americans, anyway? This is from the Wall Street Journal:

  Frito-Lay, the snack giant owned by PepsiCo Inc., says it is pulling most of the biodegradable packaging it uses for its Sun Chips snacks, following an outcry from consumers who complained the new bags were too noisy.

  Come on. Dude, you're sitting in front of your TV and the bag is too noisy? You're at home, for Pete's sake. The noise isn't going to kill you. And if the bag is too noisy for the place where you're trying to open it, here's a tip: any place where the bag noise is a problem is a place where you shouldn't be eating chips in the first place.
  

Today's Koan: If a reference can't be cited using MLA, does it really exist?

If a reference can't be cited using MLA (or Chicago), does it really exist?

For example, say you have a Kindle or an iPad. I've been given an iPad as a present--yay!--so let's stick with that as an example. You can download books from the Kindle store on Amazon.com, if you put the free Kindle app on your iPad. You can also buy or download books from the iBooks store, including free public domain ones. The thing that doesn't come along with these nifty editions is a set of page numbers that corresponds to the page numbers in the original text.

That's not a problem with .pdf documents, since they're images of the original. You can read them and, since Sept. 30, annotate them using the GoodReader app, or read and annotate them using iAnnotate. You can copy text from the .pdf and paste it into Docs-to-Go.

So far, I like the experience of reading on the iPad. If you have a book with endnotes, for example, the endnotes are links, so you can click on the note and then click back to the text. You can write notes in both the Kindle and iBooks apps, although I haven't explored that much because it's harder than I thought it would be to type on the screen-based keyboard.

What if you want to cite a book that you've downloaded? Kindle books--for scholarly books, anyway--cost about the same as the paperback edition, and they cost more than a used copy, so if I'm going to shell out the money for one, I want to be sure that I don't need to get another copy.

The piece of advice I've found most often is "go get a print copy of the book, find the citation, and cite the page." This is probably the best advice for now, but it's a colossal timewaster and a duplication of effort to have to hunt up the book if you've already bought it. If the book is in Google Books, you could try searching for the phrase in there, but a lot of books aren't in Google Books.

APA has addressed this by suggesting that you cite is as you would any unpaginated material: "Name the major sections (chapter, section, and paragraph number; abbreviate if titles are long), like you would do if you were citing the Bible or Shakespeare." Since paragraphs aren't numbered, I would be less than thrilled to have to scroll through and count the paragraphs just so I could cite the reference. And what about paratextual elements such as epigraphs? Do they count as paragraphs when you're counting?

Some other sources suggest that you cite the Kindle location number, which would be swell if the editor of the journal you're submitting to has a Kindle and not so much otherwise.

The Chicago Manual of Style suggests just citing the Kindle edition and maybe the chapter number.

The MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers, Seventh Edition floats above the fray by saying (in 5.7.18) that you should just say what kind of file it is: "Microsoft Word file, JPEG file" or whatever. Presumably you could say "Kindle file" or "iBooks file" there, too, although all of the examples given are for short pieces. That wouldn't provide much information if you were trying to cite from a book-length source. As EduKindle asks, "Why is it so hard to cite a passage on a Kindle?"

Beats me. I'll be happy when MLA gets this straightened out, almost as happy as I'll be when they decide to jettison those #@%$& angle brackets that they make you put around a URL (see 5.6.1) as though we'd all just stare helplessly at an http:// prefix without knowing it was a web address unless it was safely contained in a set of angle brackets. [Edited to add: tenthmedieval has a good explanation for this in the comments.]

Signs of the times: "Why do they hate us?"

This isn't as much a post as a link roundup of posts explaining why the educated middle class is to blame for--well, just about everything. The title riffs on Thomas Hart Benton's musings of the same name at The Chronicle.

1. For a minute or two, I thought the Chronicle had let up on the professor-bashing, and Benton does give some logical answers to his questions (albeit ones that we've mostly discussed on blogs before). But fearing that he's gone too far, he slides into his hairshirt and admonishes us to do the same:

But perhaps it is enough to say that the reason we feel more "hated" than ever is that we deserve it. Instead of collaborating, we competed with each other. We focused on our research instead of on the needs of undergraduates. We even exploited our graduate students, using their labor to underwrite our privileges, and then we relegated most of them to marginal positions as adjuncts. We waited too long to institute reforms to our profession, and now—after 40 years of inaction—the reforms are going to be forced upon us.

You hear that, you academic Marie Antoinettes? It's not that education has been systematically defunded over the past forty years, or that tenure-track jobs have been decimated, or that administration and college athletics have fattened themselves at the expense of instruction. It's not even that economic conditions and laws designed by the wealthy and for the wealthy have gutted the middle class, or that the richest 1% of Americans have gone from taking in 9% of the country's income in the 1970s to 23% in 2007. Nope, it's all our fault, because while the media were breathlessly waiting to hear what we had to say, we squandered the opportunity by bickering, and being selfish, and saying "let them eat cake," and all that.

2. Feeling guilty yet? No? Maybe that's because you're not a lazy librarian. Now, the public librarians I've known have worked very hard for very little money, but Santa Clarita just privatized its libraries and outsourced the work to a foreign-owned company, L.S.S.I., whose spokesperson makes the following winsome pitch about his love of learning in wanting to run the library:

“A lot of libraries are atrocious,” Mr. Pezzanite said. “Their policies are all about job security. That’s why the profession is nervous about us. You can go to a library for 35 years and never have to do anything and then have your retirement. We’re not running our company that way. You come to us, you’re going to have to work.”

See, what regular librarians with a living wage and pensions do is "never have to do anything." What his workers will do for a pittance, besides enrich the pockets of investors and retire into poverty, is "work."

3. Still not convinced that the economic downturn is the fault of the college-educated middle class, with special guilt points if you're engaged in trying to keep knowledge alive? You're supposed to die if you're over 50 and don't have a job; everybody knows that. The conservative columnist Megan McArdle will show you the error of your ways in The Atlantic, but I'll let alicublog recap her two most recent posts for you:

• [McArdle] actually composed something called "Why Are The Rich So Rich?" that basically answered the question with Beats me, but it's definitely not because they have some unfair advantage!
• MEGAN McARDLE'S ADVICE FOR OLD PEOPLE WHO LOSE THEIR JOBS: Have more money, and get to work.

4. Actually, the one person who seems to get why they hate us and say so honestly is Warren Buffett. From the New York Times, 26 November 2006:

“There’s class warfare, all right,” Mr. Buffett said, “but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.”

Too ranty? Maybe I should take this down. Let me know.

Philip Roth on writing

From this month's Esquire, Philip Roth on writing (p. 186):

Has the writing gotten any easier?

That's hard to answer. There are days and weeks that are very difficult. I've never been without the struggle. When I started writing, I did have false starts. I would write seventy-five, a hundred pages of something and toss it aside. I don't do that. I don't make false starts any longer. So that's an improvement.

Who knows what'll happen in the next ten years. Maybe it'll get better. Maybe it'll get worse. I don't know. At this stage of the game, you don't know what's going to happen. You see different writers as they get old, what happens to them. Some shut down. Some write sporadically--the way Bellow did it.

I have a slogan I use when I get anxious writing, which happens quite a bit: "The ordeal is part of the commitment." It's one of my mantras. It makes a lot of things doable.

Mine is from a fat relief pitcher, Bob Wickman: You gotta trust your stuff.

That's very good. I used to have little things over my desk at various times. One of them was "Don't judge it." Just write it. Don't judge it. It's not for you to judge it.

I have four or five friends who I ask to read my final drafts and to say whatever they want to say to me about it. I put it through that sieve, and they tell me what they think about it, and then I consider it and make changes if it seems appropriate. Often it does.

[See also Historiann's post on scholars writing about writing.]

Today in numbers

• Approximate number of words written today: about 3,000.
• Number of words that had anything to do with my own writing: 0.
• Number of words in letters of recommendations, etc.: about 3,000.
• Number of words in emails: who counts?
• Most frequent interjection: "Don't you dare quit on me, screen! Don't you dare go all white and fuzzy with a "Not responding" sign. Don't you know I'm 2 hours into this letter already? What's that? The little Vista spinning blue circle that means the system is going nowhere fast?"
• Number of times I sat and watched the little circle spin: who counts?
  

A new reason for writing class notes by hand

The New York Times Magazine has an article about middle-school students using the Livescribe pen (used to be Pulse Pen) in class. Short version: it's helping them, for several reasons:

• They can focus more on what the teacher's saying instead of trying to write down everything, since the pen captures the audio of the lecture. One student just writes down "LIST" if the teacher is rattling off a series of items; he then goes back to fill in the list.
• They can review the material with the audio and fill in their notes later.

I suspect that part of the benefit here is that with this pen, students are actually going over their notes more than they used to. They're also able to relax and listen to the teacher, which may take away some anxiety.

Of course, one education expert is raining on this particular parade. Lisa Nielsen, who works for the school district, doubts whether this is useful; teachers should instead be pulling in YouTube videos and web sites from "content experts" because, after all, students who were given (and probably memorized) a teacher's PowerPoint slides did better on a test than those who listened in class. They don't need to "write down everything that the teacher says."

Well, who said they did? The point of the article is that students don't have to write down everything but that they tend to be more focused--in part because if they're talking instead of paying attention, the pen picks that up, too.

I wonder, though, how much information those students retained after a few weeks and whether those given PowerPoints were able to recall the information as well as the others. The article doesn't say, but it does predict that maybe having one good note-taker in a class would allow everyone else to stop taking notes.

I think this misses the point. For a lot of people (myself included), making those marks on a piece of paper while listening helps you to focus and remember the content better. The marks can be notes, or they can be doodles; it's the process of making the marks that helps. If you write notes instead of drawing a giant, tattoo-like picture in your notebook, the notes may help you later, but for concentrating at that moment, both kinds of making marks seem to accomplish the same thing.

At any rate, it'd be interesting to see if this worked in a college classroom. It would be right up there with the other invention I'd like to see: a giant tilted mirror at the back of the room like those in stage musicals, so that I could see who's taking notes and who's writing vital Facebook updates.