Decision fatigue

Dame Eleanor has a fascinating post and links to good articles about something called "decision fatigue." Put simply, researchers have found that your willpower goes down, as does your ability to make good decisions, when you've had to make a series of decisions over the course of a day.  You'll do anything to make it stop, including compromising in ways that you don't want to do or refusing to make any decision at all. The effect is magnified if your brain is starved of glucose: it needs that energy for willpower, which is in keeping with what other brain researchers found earlier this year.

In personal terms, this makes a stunning amount of sense. All those chirpy self-help fillers in magazines and web sites urge us to "Try something different! Break up your routine! Take a new route home from work! Brush your teeth in a different direction!" as a route to creativity. But if you've ever tried those strategies, you realize that they're only for leisure times when you have no work to do, because they are exhausting.

Think about it.  When you have to shop at a different grocery store, everything is in a different place and finding what you want among innumerable brands is tiring. Unless you have the fashion gene, which I do not, shopping for clothes is exhausting.  Controlled novelty--going to the farmer's market or an art gallery--can be stimulating and get the creative juices flowing, but what allows creativity to survive on a daily basis is the certainty of a physical routine that lets your mind go free. Thoreau had this one right: "Simplify, simplify." So did William James on the value of habit. One person's controlled novelty might be another person's occasion for decision fatigue, but the principle is still there.

The recent Vanity Fair article on President Obama indicated that he's cut his wardrobe down to blue suits and gray suits, or something like that, so that he can cut down on the time spent deciding.  Good call, Mr. President. Don't we do the same kinds of thing when we buy the same pair of pants or sweater in a couple of colors, just so we don't have to go to the department store again for a couple of years (or is that just my strategy)?

According to the researcher quoted in the New York Times article above,  "people with the best self-control are the ones who structure their lives so as to conserve willpower. They don’t schedule endless back-to-back meetings. They avoid temptations like all-you-can-eat buffets, and they establish habits that eliminate the mental effort of making choices. Instead of deciding every morning whether or not to force themselves to exercise, they set up regular appointments to work out with a friend. Instead of counting on willpower to remain robust all day, they conserve it so that it’s available for emergencies and important decisions."

In other words, a regular routine isn't limiting to creativity. It's freeing because it conserves your energy to make the important decisions related to your creative life.

#AcWriMo, #NaNoWriMo -- it all spells "writing"

George Williams at the Chronicle marks the start of Academic Writing Month, or AcWriMo, from the old NaNoWriMo that some of us have done in previous years. Here are the rules:

1. Set yourself some crazy goals.
2. Publicly declare your participation and goals.
3. Draft a strategy.
4. Discuss what you’re doing.
5. Don’t slack off.
6. Publicly declare your results.

This may help me meet the goals at Dame Eleanor's (after not checking in last week).
So here goes:

1 & 2. Crazy goals and public participation. How much writing is possible, especially if you're teaching and having to research some of the things you're writing about? NaNoWriMo's goal used to be 50,000-80,000 words for the month, which may work for fiction writers  but not for academics.

A thousand words a day would be nice, but there are some more of those 14-hour days coming up when that wouldn't be possible.

I'm going with this one: write every day.  I actually did write every day except for one day in September. If you're kind, please don't ask me about October. Crazy goal: finish this chapter by mid-month (part is already drafted) and get a good way into the next one.

3. Draft a strategy. Since October was such a morass of travel, grading, and service, here's the strategy for this month:

• 750words.com keeps me honest, which is how I was able to keep to this in September,  so that will be one strategy.  
• Writing by hand in a book that I keep with me all the time now, as suggested by Flavia, is another. 
• Writing first thing in the morning, before "anyone gets up" or "can hurt your feelings," as Francis Ford Coppola suggests, is another. 
• Strict Pomodoro (for Chrome) helps, too. 

More global strategies:

• Reverse the order of braintime so that the writing, not the classes, is getting the bulk of the time. 
• Recognize that the temptation to gild lilies in the classroom is a sign of the brain trying to avoid writing. 
• Especially don't waste early morning creative time with thinking about classes several days hence.

4-6. Discuss what you're doing, don't slack off, and publicly declare your results.  

Are you in?

Vote vote vote

First of all, I hope all in the Sandy states are safe and well.

If you haven't voted already and you're in an early voting state, go and do it.
If you're in a regular-voting state, figure out how you're going to get there and make a plan to vote.
If you are female, you have had this right for less than 100 years (it boggles the mind), so you ought to do it for the foremothers.

It does make a difference, especially in this close election year, and if you are in an in-person voting state, you get to see the election ladies and feel good about participating in something that helps us all.

Of course I have opinions, lots of opinions, about how you should vote, but you don't need to hear them. What you need to do is vote.

The news from Amherst

[Trigger warning for sexual assault accounts at the links and phrases below.]

The New York Times story on the dismissal of a rape survivor's story at Amherst and of the institutional response is horrifying. Most horrifying is the attempt to gaslight the victim into questioning what she saw, felt, experienced, and had (in the institution's mind) the audacity to report. 

She was asked "Are you sure it was rape?" and told she couldn't change rooms despite feeling unsafe.  She was told not to seek justice, since it would be pointless. She was sent away and institutionalized for a time. 

While the responses she and others received from friends are terrible, the ones from the institution are worse.  The former try to mitigate a terrible reality, but the latter--from administrators who should know better--try to convince her that nothing ever happened, that the real problem is her response to being assaulted and wanting to see something done about it, presumably to insulate the institution from any liability or responsibility for what happened. 

We have all read about this sort of response for too many years--of victims forced to sit in "mediation sessions" with the rapist on campuses, of military survivors of rape labeled with a mental illness and discharged from the service without benefits rather than having the rape dealt with as an assault, which this case disturbingly brought to mind.

A cynical person would conclude that the institutions are only concerned when issues of liability or publicity are brought into the picture, but I think it's more complicated than that: there needs to be immediate change not just in the rhetoric of dealing with assault but in campus culture and methods of response, including the increasing involvement of professionals. Amherst president Dr. Biddy Martin has said that this must stop and she seems to mean business:

But in her first year here, after hearing from students, she made several changes, like having trained investigators look into those cases, revising the student handbook, and hiring a nationally known consultant, Gina M. Smith, to review and revise Amherst’s approach. She . . . released a statement that had neither the defensiveness nor the bland wait-and-see that are common to institutional responses, declaring that things “must change, and change immediately.” She made more administrative changes, and said in an interview in her office on Thursday that she is inclined to make more still, like having experts — rather than shifting panels of professors and students — adjudicate complaints.

Let's hope that this kind of proactive response spreads, and let's demand it at our institutions. 

TIME leads the cheering for MOOCs

"And the heavens parted, and behold, the MOOC descended from heaven and revolutionized education"--no, wait. That's not a quotation but only the tone of the author's puffy opinion piece, this week's feature article in Time.  Here is the shorter version, so you can decide whether to read it yourself.

A sample "fact": "Online classes were not, generally speaking, very good. To this day, most are dry, uninspired affairs, consisting of a patchwork of online readings, written Q&As and low-budget lecture videos" (35).

Hey, there, Ms. Author: do you have any source for that, or are we just playing straw man bingo here? Straw man bingo, you say? Okey-dokey then.  Just checking. I thought Time fancied itself a news magazine, but whatevs.

Amid the glow of the piece--the physics MOOC at Udacity was so awesome!--a piece so fulsome that I thought glitter was going to spring off the page, I did learn this tidbit from Udacity's co-founder David Stavens: "I think the top 50 schools are probably safe.  There's a magic that goes on inside a university campus that, if you can afford to live in side the bubble, is wonderful" (41). Gee, you think?

And when Author visits the University of the District of Columbia, she sees the other kind of school that is "safe": "very selective--and very unselective--colleges will continue to survive" (41).

The rest of us? Well, we're pretty much --- oh, go ahead and supply the word yourself: obsolete. Jonathan Rees has been warning us about this, in more elegant language, for months now.

And there's more! Here's the takeaway: "Ideally, Udacity and other MOOC providers will help strip away all the distractions of higher education--the brand, the price and the facilities--and remind all of us that education is about learning" (41). You don't say!  About learning? Really? Not about sports teams and the facilities that universities keep building in a desperate arms race for students? Not about creating a community of people who can learn together? Not about the connections to community, alumni, businesses, and place that can help a lot of students through internships and jobs? Not about research--for who'll do the research when professors at the Top 50 are teaching all the courses in the country? I read this and wondered idly how many graduates of the Top 50 got jobs in part through their connections, people they knew from their university experience, extra research they did by working with a professor, a project they did that an employer saw--no, that surely doesn't have an effect on a person's career. At all.

Well, since I have actual students who sent in actual papers to be graded, I have to sign off now.  Given the pace of the cheerleading, I guess I should be grateful that we still have classes and the opportunity to connect with students, since apparently that whole model is going the way of the dodo.

Can reading prevent psychopathy?

From a fascinating and disturbing article in The Chronicle, it appears that the answer is maybe, kinda, sorta yes.

With the aid of fMRI, Zacks and his co-authors peered deep inside the brains of volunteers as they read stories. What they found provided an intriguing insight into the way our brain constructs our sense of self. Changes in characters' locations (e.g., "went out of the house into the street") were associated with increased activity in regions of the temporal lobes involved in spatial orientation and perception, while changes in the objects that a character interacted with (e.g., "picked up a pencil") produced a similar increase in a region of the frontal lobes known to be important for controlling grasping motions. Most important, however, changes in a character's goal elicited increased activation in areas of the prefrontal cortex, damage to which results in impaired knowledge of the order and structure of planned, intentional action. 

Imagining, it would seem, really does make it so. Whenever we read a story, our level of engagement is such that we "mentally simulate each new situation encountered in a narrative," according to one of the researchers, Nicole Speer. Our brains then interweave these newly encountered situations with knowledge and experience gleaned from our own lives to create an organic mosaic of dynamic mental syntheses. 

Reading a book carves brand-new neural pathways into the ancient cortical bedrock of our brains. It transforms the way we see the world—makes us, as Nicholas Carr puts it in his recent essay, "The Dreams of Readers," "more alert to the inner lives of others." We become vampires without being bitten—in other words, more empathic. Books make us see in a way that casual immersion in the Internet, and the quicksilver virtual world it offers, doesn't.

Combined with other recent brain research on deep reading,  maybe we have a new sort of argument to make to those who want to gut the humanities in favor of science.  That won't help with the people who hate all knowledge and learning as belonging to "snobs," but it's a start.

Random bullets of this week

• There was a lot of time spent this week, and very little of it belonged to me, though I had to be there. If you're an academic, you probably know that feeling. 
• Hearing more about requirements for promotion to full professor was interesting: all involved research productivity, and none involved warming a chair at various meetings and burning a whole writing day to do so. Collegiality and showing up may be important, but it doesn't count as research productivity.  
• Ditto for writing committee reports, creating new assignments, and preparing for class.
• Ditto for teaching, especially when you have one class that is . . . challenging . . . in the seeming lack of interest in some members on occasion to read and participate in class discussions.
• But part of this is my own fault for not looking at my own work every day. Except for the days when I got up at 5 a.m. and didn't get home until 9:45 that night, I could have done something, even if it was just reading the chapter over again. 
• And there were some good conversations with colleagues whom I rarely see, so that goes on the plus side of the ledger. And a good, sanity-restoring lunch with a colleague from another institution.

So this week's goal at Dame Eleanor's is really to do better than I did this week. 

Writing inspiration: Hilary Mantel

From The New Yorker: 

When she wakes in the morning, she likes to start writing right away, before she speaks, because whatever remnants sleep has left are the gift her brain has given her for the day. Her dream life is important to the balance of her mind: it’s the place where she experiences disorder. Her dreams are archetypal, mythological, enormous, full of pageantry—there are knights and monsters. She has been to the crusades in her dreams more than once. 

When she’s starting a new book, she needs to feel her way inside the characters, to know what it’s like to be them. There is a trick she uses sometimes, which another writer taught her. Sit quietly and withdraw your attention from the room you’re in until you’re focussed inside your mind. Imagine a chair and invite your character to come and sit in it; once he is comfortable, you may ask him questions. She tried this for the first time when she was writing “The Giant, O’Brien”: the giant came in, but, before sitting down in the chair, he bent down and tested it, to see if it would take his weight. On that occasion, she never got any further, because she was so excited that she punched the air and shouted “Yes!” But from then on she could imagine herself in the giant’s body.

In the last months of writing a book, as the end comes in sight, she becomes possessed. She doesn’t go anywhere, or talk about anything other than the book. She stops only to eat. Her sleep and work hours become erratic: often she will wake up at three in the morning, write for several hours, and then go back to bed. She becomes more and more anxious: it feels to her like stage fright, unnaturally and intolerably prolonged, as though at last she were spinning all her plates at once, darting about from one to the other and terrified of making a mistake because she knows that if one plate spins off balance they will all come crashing down.

Read more http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2012/10/15/121015fa_fact_macfarquhar#ixzz29OK4BBSv

Conference tips no one ever tells you

You all know the usual conference tips: read your paper aloud to yourself, time it, etc. Here are a few conference tips that don't get mentioned enough. 

• Pack some granola bars or crackers. Seriously. There will be early sessions and slow elevators, when riding down 30 floors to the inevitable Starbucks, waiting in line there, and riding back up to your floor (or finding a seat at said Starbucks) won't get you to an 8:00 session on time.  Unless you can afford the $15 bowl of room-service oatmeal to be delivered to you for breakfast, a granola bar or whatever will stave off enough hunger so that you can get something after the early session. 
• Drink water--a LOT of water.  When you're talking to people, running around all day, and drinking tea or coffee, it's easier to get dehydrated, especially in the dry air of hotel rooms.  Restaurant food, and especially grab-it-to-go food, can be more salty than the food you usually eat. You might not feel thirsty, but that feeling of sleepiness or distractedness in sessions can be due to being dehydrated. Drinking water will help keep your energy up. 
• When you get to the conference hotel, walk around to orient yourself. I know: this is obvious, but it's easy to forget if you've had a long trip already. Where are the restaurants? Where's a quick place to grab a sandwich? Is there a drugstore or little grocery store handy to get fruit or snacks? What about a bookstore? 
• Look up at the hotel's exterior shape and facade: what street is it on? what's distinctive about it, so if you get lost a few blocks away you can look up and see it?
• If you always end up tinkering with your paper and need to print a copy, does the hotel have a business center, and what are its charges? (Most do, but some in smaller places don't.) If not, is there a copy shop or FedEx close by? 
• The Q & A at the end of the session is often a great discussion (even though sometimes people want to Hold Forth), and if you rush out after the last paper, you'll miss it. It's a great way to have a conversation, or at least to be in the conversation, with others who are interested in your subject matter. Even if you don't want to ask a question, you'll probably learn something interesting. 
• If you liked someone's paper, say so, either after the session or when you see the person later. 
• If you are presenting, try to listen to the others who are in your session or at least to seem to listen. If you pull out your cell phone and check it or keep typing on your laptop at the front of the room, even if you're just looking something up or tweeting, it signals inattention and might be unnerving to the person who's speaking. 
• Talk to people and go to events, even if you're not a natural extrovert. There are all kinds of conference small talk you can engage in to introduce yourself, from something specific about a paper or an author ("I'm interested in what you had to say about X") to more general introductory topics ("What are you working on now?") to the conference itself to general things about travel, food, and places to eat. Unless your name is Bill Clinton, you might feel a little strange about going into a reception and talking to people you don't know, but that's part of what conferences are for.  
• Bring your professional cards, if you have them. I know: it's old school, we're living in a digital age, and all that, but I still see a surprising number of people exchanging cards at conferences. It's still easier to exchange cards than to write down someone's email address when you're rushing to another session or straining to hear them over the din of a reception. 

Any other tips? 

This is your brain on Jane Austen.

No time for a real post, but this story from NPR is some food for thought. A researcher who noticed that she could get so absorbed in a book that "the house could burn down" around her wondered whether the brain processed information differently with this kind of absorbed reading instead of casual reading (with Twitter, cell phone, internet, Facebook leaping into the reader's consciousness every few minutes). She teamed up with neuroscientists to test her hypothesis, and guess what she found?

"Everyone told me to expect these really, really minute and subtle effects," she said, "because everyone was going to be doing the same thing, right? Reading Jane Austen. And they were just going to be doing it in two different ways."

Phillips said she mainly expected to see differences in parts of the brain that regulate attention because that was the main difference between casual and focused reading.

But in a neuroscientific plot twist, Phillips said preliminary results showed otherwise: "What's been taking us by surprise in our early data analysis is how much the whole brain — global activations across a number of different regions — seems to be transforming and shifting between the pleasure and the close reading." 

Phillips found that close reading activated unexpected areas: parts of the brain that are involved in movement and touch. It was as though readers were physically placing themselves within the story as they analyzed it.

So the next time you hear about multitasking while reading being just the same as reading deeply, you can say, with authority, "No. No, it's not."  Jane Austen will thank you for it.

Tweeting conference sessions: it's not all about the tweets

The recent kerfuffle about twittergate asks some questions that have come up at Chez Undine and other blogs after the 2011 MLA Conference:

• Is it rude to tweet someone's remarks at a conference? [I don't think so.]
•  If so, is that because of the content of the tweets or the distraction of having someone sitting there tapping away while the presenter is talking? [Distraction.]
• Is there an expectation of privacy at a conference session? [Hmmm. Yes and no, but read the comments, such as Mark Sample's, at IHE.] 

Kathleen Fitzpatrick weighs in with some sensible advice: respect the speaker's preferences, but do tweet if possible, being careful to distinguish your ideas from the speaker's words.

This is all sound advice, but it misses something that those who are upset about tweeting (and I'm not, for the record) don't see. After watching this phenomenon at a few rounds of conferences over the past couple of years, where some sessions were tweeted and some not, I can tell the upset presenters this:  having someone tweet your session is a compliment, since only the sessions that tweeters consider to be cool or interesting will be tweeted at all.  It's like being a musician and having a non-satiric Weird Al Yankovic pick your song to record. 

That was hugely apparent at the last MLA, when during some sessions several tweeters would come in and sit at the back tables reserved for them while at other sessions those tables sat empty except for the discarded water glasses of a previous session.  

There's an interesting dynamic at work, I think: genuine curiosity about certain subjects makes people want to tweet those panels, but in watching the tweets and the tweeters, I also sensed an air of reclaiming the conference and reconfiguring it in a different way, establishing an alternative hierarchy to the more traditional groups of old-guard scholars  and creating a community through tweets.

I could be entirely wrong about this, but focusing on the act of tweeting may be looking too narrowly at the subject. There's a complex culture of tweeting behavior at conferences that would make a great study for some sociologist or anthropologist. 

Creativity: the best time to do everything

In "Your Body's Best Time to Do Everything," The Wall Street Journal provides a little pop psych that I can believe in, more or less.

• 8 a.m. Write upbeat tweets. [No thanks.]
• 9 a.m. High energy and clarity; have difficult talks now. [No thanks. Use that energy ]
• 10 a.m. Do cognitive work. Working memory and concentration tend to peak mid-morning. [Good writing time!] 
• 2 p.m. Take a short nap. Sleepiness hits its peak. [Don't we wish we could all do this?]
• 4 p.m. Do physical work. Eye-hand coordination rises in late afternoon.
• 5 p.m. Work out. Muscle strength and flexibility rises later in the day. 
• 9 p.m. Work creatively. People's freshest, most original thinking may occur at non-peak times of the day, which for most people is evening. Fatigue may lower inhibitions and open the mind to offbeat ideas and solutions. [Finally a research finding that confirms what I've experienced for years.]

Here's a writing inspiration post from Inside Higher Ed. 

You want to ask me again?

• If the papers were posted, you would see them posted. 
• If they are not posted, they are not posted.
• If I said I would let you know by email when they are ready, I will let you know by email when they are ready.
• If you email me about the papers, what I think about is the guy in the pickup truck who roars up behind my car when I'm already going a safe amount over the speed limit: it will not make me go any faster, and it will not improve my mood.

Using iAnnotate with JStor, Project Muse, and downloaded .pdf files

For those who've been frustrated (as I have) by iAnnotate's quirky refusal to sync files that you download into it directly.

To get .pdf files from JStor, Project Muse, or another database into iAnnotate:

1. If you're on an iPad: Go into Project Muse, JStor, or whatever. Bring up the article in .pdf
2. Touch the upper right corner to get to the Open In buttons. DO NOT press Open in iAnnotate. If you do, you'll mark up the text for nothing, since iAnnotate won't save or sync it. Instead, press Open In and choose Dropbox.
3. Choose the destination in Dropbox and save it.
4. Once it's saved in Dropbox, select the file. it will open in the Dropbox window.
5. Click on the little arrow that's in the corner. Your options will be Print or Open in. Select Open In and choose iAnnotate.
6. Now that it's been loaded from Dropbox, you can mark up the article and the annotations will sync properly.

To get .doc and .docx files to convert and sync properly: 
Short version: you can't do this any more.

 It used to be that you could download a .doc or .docx file from Dropbox, convert it to a .pdf using iAnnotate, mark it up, and re-upload it to Dropbox using the tab at the top of the document.


Now, all you can do is mark it up and admire it on your iPad, because there's no way to upload the converted file.

There is a workaround: 1. do all of the above. 2. email the converted file to yourself. 3. save it in Dropbox. Why make us do the three extra steps, though?

Writing Inspiration: Ta-Nehisi Coates

This struck me as good writing inspiration material: Ta-Nehisi Coates on why he doesn't spend as much time gaming any more: 

Writing has, increasingly, taken up residence in the space where I used to put fandom. Even nonfiction writing, for me, requires an act of imagination because I am always thinking of ways to afflict the reader with some of what I feel. I'm not simply trying to afflict him/her logically, but also emotionally. The writing must emote. To do that I employ the same imagination I once put into the nasty poison-spewing green dragon (or was she blue? red?) from the Isle of Dread, and redirect to (attempted) acts of literature. 

http://www.theatlantic.com/ta-nehisi-coates/

Popular culture in the classroom

Bardiac and Jennifer Finney Boylan, in a guest post at Tenured Radical, recently wrote about the cultural references they share (or don't share) with younger colleagues (Bardiac) and students (Boylan).  Boylan says that the last piece of common ground seems to be Harry Potter, which is probably about right, and that she'd watch SNL but that the host is Seth McFarlane, and she doesn't know who that is. I do know, but primarily because of listening to Fresh Air, which is for non-cool people like myself the place where we find out what's going on in the culture.

Except for a few television shows (Arrested Development, and that's an old one to them), I don't think my students and I share many cultural references beyond Santa Claus and current internet memes.  I know from asking them that Mad Men and Downton Abbey aren't on their radar screens--as why would they be?--but then again Futurama and Family Guy are only dimly on mine. Music years are like double-dog years to them: a song from 2010 that I heard and liked would be approximately 14 years old in cultural time, so I don't even try with music.

The places where we find common ground are those that you can't help knowing about even if you've never read or seen them: Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, usually Star Wars, and maybe Star Trek in all its variations.  But since my interests lie much more in the popular culture that's way back in the past even for me and far more so for them, I'm happy to learn from them what they choose to tell me about what cultural touchstones they share, and I try to find analogies from the past that might help.  They seem to enjoy educating me, and the feeling is mutual.

How do you bridge the culture gap?

Can MOOC's sell textbooks? King Gillette and the Razor Blade

Jennifer Howard's article "Can MOOC's Help Sell Textbooks?" raises some interesting issues, to wit: if  MOOC's are supposed to be gloriously free for everyone, is it even ethical to require a textbook? A snippet, with some pieces removed: 

But online courses do have recommended-reading lists, and enrollments in the tens of thousands. If even a small percentage of those online students buy books, the sales could add up to a nice boost for a textbook. 

"We are actively tracking the development of MOOC's and believe they do represent a promising market for university-press titles," said Ellen W. Faran, director of the MIT Press. 

Online-course providers continue to draw the line at required reading, and instructors—including those with books to sell—have abided by such guidelines, at least so far. 

"We do strongly urge instructors not to require any textbooks that cost money, since we want the courses to remain accessible even to students that cannot afford to purchase a textbook, including the many that don't even have a credit card," said Ms. Koller, of Coursera, in an e-mail interview.

So it does seem to be profitable to have a MOOC that recommends or requires a book, since "strongly urge" does not mean "prohibit." That's assuming that the student chooses to pay for the printed version instead of reading the book online at flatworldknowledge.com  (or, if it's not there, probably illegally uploaded to a web site). I'm assuming a worst-case scenario here, in which textbooks are required.

But isn't this the same issue as an instructor requiring students to buy the book that ze has written, multiplied by 40,000 instead of 40? The common wisdom on that, which I've gleaned through conversations with others and lurking on the Chronicle's forums, is that if you require a book through which you receive a financial benefit, even if it's the key textbook on the subject, you're supposed to remit the royalties to the students, donate them to a student fund, or otherwise ensure that you don't profit from having the power to require students to purchase the book. How does that work when you have 40,000 or 100,000 students in other countries? One principled professor (can't recall his name) got the publisher to agree to distribute his textbook for free to his Coursera students, but that apparently isn't the norm.

This does answer one question I've had about MOOC's: how will they make money? Here's an analogy. The story goes that King Gillette,* when he was trying to get men to adopt the safety razor rather than the straight razor, decided to give away the razors and charge for the razor blades.  Because they couldn't use the razor without the blades, he'd have them as customers for life, so it was worth taking a loss on the razor to sell a man blades for the next 50 years.  Printer manufacturers do the same thing today: they all but give away the printer and charge a hefty fee for the printer ink cartridges. I wonder if the maker of those machines that use those little coffee pods that are so fashionable now uses the same model, but I haven't looked.

So you lose money on the course, because it's free, but you make money back on the peripherals: you charge for the exam that students take for certification, for textbooks, and, I'm betting in time, for access to the bulletin boards through which the discussion is conducted, since that is already a model being used in traditional universities.

And say you're an elite university: let's call it MegaBucks U. You're the only kind that will have the status to offer MOOC courses while other universities, until they're forced out of business, will be pressured to accept MOOC credits.  You'll make money on the tests, which you'll write and contract out for someone else to deliver; on the textbooks, from your university press; and from the increased visibility and good press that MegaBucks will receive by making "the world's knowledge available to millions" or whatever catch phrase is being bandied about this week.

And you still won't allow MegaBucks U's students to take a MOOC course for credit, because that would be very wrong and dilute the brand.

Again, I ask you: what am I missing here?

*Wikipedia says he wasn't the first to do it, but he's the most iconic figure, so I'm sticking to the analogy.

Edited to add: I am not categorically opposed to any of this, but I really want to see these questions answered. 

Midweek RBOC

• Drive home, change clothes to go for walk/run. Lie down just for a second and fall asleep instantly. Yeah, getting up at 5 to write but then staying up till 11:30 to prep classes will do that to you. 
• I've been writing in a notebook after rediscovering it and realizing it was easier to read that in some ways than to leaf through all the pages of the research notebook as computer files.  It was also sort of fun to see what I was doing 3-4 years ago at this time--working through ideas, failing at keeping up a Boice chart, and all that. 
• Get a Life has some good strategies, and, as she says, things go better when you plan. Falling dead asleep instead of getting at the evening's work was not part of the plan.
• For the first time I've heard people referring non-ironically to "protecting my time," as in "protecting Fridays" or "keeping my Fridays for research days." They're unapologetic about it, and now, so am I.  "I'm not available" is about all I say, but it does the trick. Our new chair seems to support this perspective, too, which helps. 
• My goal is not to get Rhett Butler back, but after today's crash into sleep, I'm repeating to myself, "tomorrow is another day." 

Amazon.com's new plan

Amazon.com is experimenting with off-line retailing, including brick-and-mortar stores and a locker pickup service for people who can't be at home when the UPS or FedEx truck rolls around.

Instead of shipping to your house, Amazon will ship to the locker.  It will also charge an extra $2-3 for the privilege of picking up your stuff, although if the lockers are located inside stores, the store owner may choose to eat the cost to get more customers into the store.

It'll be cheaper for Amazon to deliver to a locker, and "Amazon could entice customers to use the service by offering discounts or freebies, such as same-day delivery at no extra charge, Harvey said."

Let's review:

• To buy from a traditional bookstore: Drive to bookstore, browse, pay for book (including sales tax), and take book home for instant reading.
• To buy from this future iteration of Amazon: Go online, browse, pay for book (including sales tax), pay for shipping unless you have Amazon Prime. Wait a few hours or a few days, drive to pickup center, pay pickup center charge, take book home for reading. 
• Or as above, with an extra charge for shipping this to your house, because a "discount" for picking something up at a locker center translates into an extra charge for what's now free if you have Amazon Prime: shipping to your house.

I can see how this would work for unusual or hard-to find items, but for most books? How is Amazon's plan more convenient? I'm not seeing it, unless you're ordering an academic book or something that you might otherwise buy at Madio Mack if they hadn't irritated you beyond belief in your previous contact with them. 

Weekly roundup of academic issues

• I'm late in posting about the CSU "expiry date" ad (now changed), but Dr. Crazy and Historiann and Sisyphus and now Timothy Burke have weighed in on the unfairness of it all. 
• I don't have anything to add to this one, because you've all addressed it so well.
• On MOOCS, Indyanna over at Historiann's place quotes from Tamar Lewin's piece: 


Isn’t that amazing? At my school the Political Science department couldn’t develop a course on non-governmental organizations, nor could Physics and Astronomy decide to teach about superstring theory without jumping through a year’s worth of committee and senate hoops to persuade every cook and baker and horse-shoer who happened to hold faculty status anywhere that the change was not going to affect somebody else’s enrollments, or cause somebody’s external accreditor to question the credentials of their majors. But U-dacity can just slide onto a campus with a “proctored test” and kaboom, the credit hours will be rolled onto the transcripts.

Isn't this true, and doesn't it say just about everything about MOOC cheerleading? And, by the way, proctored and created by whom? Who creates those tests?  Who vets the tests, since the faculty doesn't get to vet the course and the university is not going to bother vetting it? How do faculty members know that they're valid or equivalent to a course? Or doesn't the faculty's consent to courses matter if it's a MOOC?

A mostly-civil discussion about whether David Perlmutter was right to urge candidates to take jobs even in locations that are outside their comfort zone (comfort zone = New York, Boston, Chicago, or Berkeley). Alexandra Lord replies, nope, that's bad advice: better a non-academic career in a place that you love. This fits in with a piece last fall, where "Emma Thornton" didn't like the weather at her "Fine Southern University" and gave up her tenure-track job to be an adjunct in England. 

Can't both of these options (academic job in a place you don't know and non-academic job where you want to live) be valid options? Why is there such animus and snark and defensiveness about one choice or the other? It's true that if you give up a t-t academic job, you may well never get another one (see bullet point #1), but that doesn't mean that you won't have a happy life outside academe, if you're living where you want to live.  Isn't the main thing finding work that will support you and your family, and, if possible, satisfying work? Academe isn't the only place where that can happen. 

The thing is, as everyone has said many times, is that as an academic you don't usually get to have both: close proximity to family or major cities or whatever is important to you and a tenure-track job.  Knowing this, why are both camps on this issue so defensive? It's  "my intensity of commitment to academe beats your lack of intensity" versus "well, I care about my family/the arts/living a full life and you don't." Why does each feel so judged by the other? 

In an old novel one time, I read a quotation that went something like this: "Are the people telling you how to think and act going to help you in any way? No? Then why do you care what they think?" 

[Update: See also The Professor is In for her take on this.]