Update: light posting

More travel, including a visit to the land of no internets = no posts for a while.

Writing Vampire

Pack, get up at the crack of dawn, travel, work on something else entirely, return, wash clothes. Repeat that a couple of times and it does wonders for your writing schedule, as in "makes any concentration impossible." Not for everyone--there are stalwarts among you all--but I am so far from being in the writing zone that I'll have to schedule another trip just to get there.

I had lunch with a friend today, a writer. When the talk turned to writing, I couldn't stop asking her about it. So you write every morning? How many hours do you put in? You have a writing group? How is it going?

As she talked, I realized that I was drinking in this story of the writing process. It was gratifying to hear from someone who was doing successfully what I was failing to do this week, and it was also just guilt-inducing enough to make me want to try again, with renewed effort.

Gratifying and guilt-inducing. Filling up some need I had to hear about writing going well.

Yes, blog friends, I have become a writing vampire.

"Twitter can do it all"

A conversation I've been having with increasing frequency lately goes like this (redacted for content essence):

Enthusiast: "Twitter can do it all. Links to scholarship, trends in the field--it's all there. You should try Twitter."

Me: "I'm on Twitter, and I follow a fair number of people. It has some useful resources."

Enthusiast: "You really should try Twitter. It's great for keeping up with scholarship."

Me, with a little more heat: "I'M ON TWITTER. It has some useful resources, but it doesn't have everything."

Enthusiast: "Twitter has everything. It's wonderful because people tweet great insights into literature. You really should try it."

Me, giving up: "Thank you for the tech tip on this marvelous resource. Gee, I had never heard of it before."

Enthusiast: "Twitter can do it all! You should try Twitter!"

I'll spare you the rest. Let's just say the communication loop is not reaching from my mouth to Enthusiast's ear. I've talked before about how annoying it is when people assume that because you have a nuanced view of what a particular technology can and can't do, you just don't get it, so let me stop there.

Here is what I've heard in these conversations and more formal settings. Twitter is the following:

1. a great branding and self-promotion mechanism for scholars and grad students
2. a means of keeping up with the scholarship so you don't have to read those pesky journal articles
3. a source of great insights by great thinkers in the field before the insights are published
4. a way to get the gist of various speeches and sessions at conferences
5. a way to find links to resources that you'd otherwise never see.

I find #5 the most useful and sometimes #4, but "great insights"? My reaction to a lot of tweets is "well, sure," or "of course" or "that's interesting. I'll check out the link." Maybe I'm not following enough people, but I've never seen a tweet that made me feel as though Moses had come down from the mountain top with tiny, 144-character tablets.

Edited to add: in the comments, Dr. Koshary hilariously captured this "join my church" attitude:

"My Twitter is a mighty Twitter. Twitter is so great, you really should come to know Twitter. If loving Twitter is wrong, then I don't want to be right! Twitter can do anything, but Twitter lets us accidentally send sexually explicit messages meant for significant others to our parents because Twitter loves us enough to let us make our own mistakes."

Leaving on a jet plane

Some are jetting off to exotic climes like Blargistan or the Berks conference. Dame Eleanor, What Now, ADM, Dr. Koshary, and others are doing the summer writing challenge that Notorious and ADM are hosting. Still others are contemplating workspaces, like Profgrrrl, or devising monthly challenges, like nicoleandmaggie, or thinking about summer writing, like Dr. Crazy, or being (rightly) concerned about the editing they're receiving, like Horace.

As for me, I'm doing some of the above, including enough travel to disrupt the writing process, not that it takes much to disrupt the writing process. I was away, and now I'm back, and shortly I'll be leaving again. It's all stuff I signed up to do, so I shouldn't complain, but when has that ever stopped me from complaining?

Those long quiet days of trying out arguments on the cats as I sat at the desk may be over for a while, but I'll bet--or hope--that there's a burst of writing when I get back.

How to Put a PowerPoint onto an iPad

Say you already have some PowerPoint presentations that you use for classes (I mostly have pictures for the class to analyze), and you want to try using them on the iPad. Here's the problem: even if you have Keynote on your iPad, if you don't have Keynote on your main computer because it's not a Mac, Apple won't let you transfer the files via iTunes.

Here is a workaround that's probably known to thousands of people, but since I just figured it out, you get to read about it here.

1. Using Dropbox, go to the presentation. (You can also email it to yourself and open it on the iPad.) Once it's downloaded, click on the little box with an arrow in the upper right-hand corner ("Open in"). Choose Keynote.

2. It will download into Keynote, with a few warnings that the font might look different.

3. Tap on the presentation to open it. That's all there is to it.

4. You can edit the presentation in Keynote (add presenter notes, change the text, etc.), but apparently you can't save it back to Dropbox. To get the new edition on your main computer, click on the little wrench and go to Share and Print. You can save it as a keynote file, as a .pdf, or as a PowerPoint file and email it to yourself.

5. Now here is the awesome part: say you want to leave your iPad up at the podium and walk around while you show the PowerPoint. If you have an iPhone,you can use your iPhone as a remote control for the slides if you download and install Keynote Remote. Both devices have to be on the same wireless network, which shouldn't be a problem in a classroom.

If you have a separate Bluetooth Apple remote, it doesn't appear to work with the iPad (or at least I couldn't get it to work).

I learned about this in the comments on one of Pogue's posts at the NYTimes. Pogue also talks about something called "presenter view," which I had never heard of before: although the audience sees just the slide, you can see your notes and a preview of the next slide. You get to "presenter view" by going to Slide Show, Set Up Show in PowerPoint.

Random bullets of still here

• I come back to the blogosphere after a week or so and discover that many of the posts are about food--lovely food, like Comrade PhysioProf's fabulous pizza or Dr. Crazy's excellent restaurant meal. Do we rediscover food again once the semester is over and we realize that we have, you know, bodies that like to eat?
• In another vast epiphany, I realized that have fixed opinions about what makes a panel work: my panel, my rules. The rules are pretty simple:
  
1. Shut up and let the panelists shine, but don't let them talk past their allotted time (that one is a no-brainer).
2. Shorter is better for presentations, since everyone's attention spans are getting shorter.
3. Be prepared for massive technology fail but do all you can to make it succeed, like getting the presentations set up on a single computer ahead of time if possible instead of switching between them
4. Let the audience talk rather than posing a bunch of questions yourself or letting the panelists just ask each other questions.
• Addendum: I also realized that I am impervious to the criticism that arises from enforcing my rules because they work.
  

The hazards of reading literary criticism at home

As I was working at home yesterday, there was a knock at the door. I was concentrating on what I was reading, so I had the book in my hand as I opened the door and saw a clean-cut young man with a stack of handouts.

It was a religious-oriented local lawn service business, and since I didn't need the service, I politely said so. We were polite and cordial in our conversation, and then he turned to go.

As I was closing the door, he turned back to me.

"Is that a good book?"

"What?" I'd forgotten that I had the book in my hand.

"Is that a good book to read?"

"Yes. It's a book of literary criticism," I said, and shut the door.

Why on earth would he ask about the book? I thought at first maybe it was one of those salesmen's ploys--you know, where they ask for a glass of water to keep you talking to them. That hadn't seemed to be the case here, though.

Then I looked at the book in my hand. Like so many cultural studies books by a prominent publisher that rhymes with Luke Luniversity Fress, it had a provocative image on the cover--an image of a naked woman swathed in gloomy draperies, in fact. I'm sure the naked woman was performing gender or destabilizing gender identity or representing the hegemonic forces of history, but whatever she was doing, she sure was naked enough that the lawn guy noticed--and, to judge by his peculiar parting expression, didn't approve.

Random links about technology and teaching

Take these with a grain of salt and my standard disclaimers: I like technology and think it has valid uses in the classroom, hands-on learning can be useful, and all the rest.

• Here's an experiment: say you have a class that for some reason is mostly lecture, and in the eleventh week (which we could call the "week 11 slump," because anyone who's ever stood in front of a class knows that's what it is) you tell the students they'll be part of an exciting experiment about learning, and you let the postdocs take over and give them all kinds of cool interactive tools. For one week. The students who have practiced on these tools perk up and do better with their week's learning than a control group. Would you then conclude that "Postdocs Can Be Trained to Be More Effective than Senior Instructors"? You wouldn't? What kind of scientist are you, anyway?
• Kim Brooks, at Salon, wants something different to happen with high school English so that her first-year comp students can write better. I think she wants fewer hands-on assignments that ask students to make videos about how Hester Prynne would act today and a few more assignments that focus on making sure that students can write a sentence that has (1) a subject, (2) a verb, and (3) a clear point.
  
• But if you go to USC, you might get to keep making videos instead of writing papers. For the record: making videos can be a valid pedagogical choice, of course, and students can come up with some very sophisticated visual arguments. But sooner or later students are going to have to write something, aren't they? A cover letter? An email? A report? Do geologists (one of the examples) get to turn in a video assessing the prospects for drilling for oil in a particular region, or do they have to write a report? I'm guessing the latter.
• According to the Chronicle, Stanford med students, who were issued iPads last fall, demanded paper notes or books instead of reading their required books on the device, although they found the iPad useful for sketching and taking notes in lectures: "But when Stanford's School of Medicine lent iPads to all new students last August, a curious thing happened: Many didn't like using them in class. Officials had hoped to stop printing an annual average of 3,700 pages of course materials per medical student, encouraging them to use digital materials instead. Some students rebelled, and Stanford was forced to resume offering printed notes to those who wanted them. In most classes, half the students had stopped using their iPads only a few weeks into the term."
• At least no one's requiring that Atlas Shrugged be taught lest money should be withheld from the school. Oh, wait: "A separate grant from BB&T funds a course on ethics and economics in which Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged is required reading. The novel, which depicts society's collapse in the wake of government encroachment on free enterprise, was recently made into a movie marketed to tea party members."

I want a meeting . . .

Disclaimer: This isn't inspired by anything in particular.

• I want a meeting that doesn't simply repeat and elaborate on information that's already been disseminated by email, especially if the information is, as always, more bad news about the budget.
• I want a meeting that recognizes the truth of this statement: "Email is for announcements. Meetings are for action."
• I want a meeting in which faculty venting about issues that can't be changed and won't be the subject of a concerted protest is either banned or kept to a minimum.
• I want a meeting in which the phrase "We will talk about this at the next meeting" after the subject under discussion has already been talked about endlessly will be banned.
• If there's supposed to be a vote, I want a meeting in which the vote will happen.
• I want a meeting in which entirely new information that I've never heard about, even after attending every single meeting, is not presented in the context of "everybody knows about this" as a done deal.
• I want a meeting that doesn't happen and is canceled if there's no reason for it beyond the fact that it is scheduled.
• I want a meeting that I can come out of feeling as though I’d accomplished something instead of feeling angry and helpless at what the powers that be are imposing on us.

This will probably be *poofed* for rantiness, but I had to say it.

Library tales

The Little Professor has a post up about the University of Denver, which decided that a modern library could do without those messy paper things with pages. You know the things I mean: they have no digital content at all and are thus entirely useless. Best to put them in an off-site storage facility where they won't be in the way of students who want to hang out with their laptops. Here's someone who speaks for a lot of us:

Faculty members who have objected say that, while database research is important to modern-day academics, Denver researchers will invariably lose out on serendipitous discovery that comes with perusing a library’s stacks. “I know it’s kind of a touchy-feely argument, and I wish I had documented my own experience to prove it,” Headrick said. “But it’s very, very common in a lot of the social sciences. I’ll leave with five other books that I find while looking.

It's funny. We believe in digital serendipity: we find things when we're searching online that we never thought we'd find, and we boast about it. That's what Twitter is for, apparently. So why are we so apologetic about the "touchy-feely" nature of paper serendipity, which is at least as important to those in humanities fields?

And is anyone else getting tired of the argument that those of us who find it useful to look at books on shelves just don't get the digital age? I get it. I really do. Being able to search for and access texts online is a wonderful thing. But to sing the old song again, paper is a technology, too, and sometimes it's the most efficient one. I can scan through a book, read a few pages, check the index, and know whether to take it out or not in a minute or so.

I was thinking of this the other day when I went to our campus library, which was filled with students studying. (The presence of books doesn't seem to have hurt their ability to do this, by the way.) As I was checking out, the librarian helpfully pointed out that books could be delivered to departments if faculty ordered them. I appreciate that service and will probably take advantage of it at some point, especially if I'm pressed for time. There's a tradeoff, though, and its name is serendipity.

Spring madness

I have a question: how many of you have noticed that at the end of the spring semester, universities (or departments) get a little squirrelly?

Maybe some issue comes along that wouldn't rattle anyone in the fall, but in the spring everyone starts sending furious emails about it.

Or maybe a department meeting gets very tense all of a sudden over a seemingly minor issue.

Or everyone gets in an uproar about some announced policy that's been around for ages but now is seen as the decline of civilization and the end of Truly Serving the Purposes of a Liberal Education.

I can't describe it any better than this, but in my house, we call it the annual spring madness and all but place bets on when it will strike. I've seen it wherever I've taught, so it's not limited to one place. Have you seen it, too?

Notes from a former adjunct

There have been two blog threads I've watched going the rounds recently, threads I've watched from afar. One is the "burnout after tenure" thread (seen at Historiann's and elsewhere), and the other is the controversy over Tenured Radical's advice to adjuncts. I spent a lot of years as an adjunct, so I have a few thoughts:

• When TR tells you "Don't listen to senior colleagues who tell you that there will soon be a line in your field and that you are ideally positioned for it," believe it. Repeat it. Cross-stitch it on a sampler. Tattoo it on your forehead. Anyone who would tell you that is probably trying to be (1) kind or (2) hopeful about your prospects, but it's just cruel.
• Let me put it this way: If they're not willing to put a ring on it, so to speak, when they're telling you that they can't live without you because of all your fancy extra service work and great teaching, they're not going to be more likely to do so when a shiny new parade of faculty candidates comes to campus. If you decide to stay when your department is courting the shiny ones, that's your decision, but do so with your eyes open.
  
• Let me put it another way: do you remember the movie An Officer and a Gentleman? For those who didn't see it, Richard Gere is a Navy officer-in-training and Louis Gossett, Junior, is the grizzled old sergeant. Gossett knocks the snotty attitude out of Gere and teaches him life lessons. At the end, Gere is a shiny new officer, ready to have an exciting career, and Gossett is . . . the grizzled old sergeant, waiting to knock some sense into the next batch of snotty recruits and show them the ropes. I did not want to become that grizzled old sergeant (adjunct) showing the new officers (t-t faculty) the ropes of the place, even if it meant getting out of teaching altogether.
  
• On the other hand, New Kid says that "there is a whole cohort of people out there for whom contingent employment is their career." Absolutely true. A lot of people who were adjuncting in my old department are still adjuncting there many years later, either because they had family ties or because they didn't want to leave grad school city.
  
• I have known people who have retired from their positions as adjuncts, and they were happy about their careers.
  
• I've also known people who became administrators of programs, or advisers, or otherwise were employed in academia without tenure-track positions, and they were happy, too.
  

This isn't to say that there shouldn't be more tenure-track jobs, or that the job market is bad, or that those who want t-t jobs shouldn't be angry, or any of that. I don't have any advice.

Scenes from the front office: "Excellence without Money" in action

It's registration time, and two days after it started, Required Course X is completely filled up for this summer and next fall. I've fielded my share of desperate emails this week and went to our departmental front office to see if there were any options. Nope--no options.

Students were coming through the doors as I waited, and the phone kept ringing. The message our administrative assistant gave was always the same:

"No, sorry, there aren't any more sections available."

"Sorry, but because of budget cuts, we only have so many instructors to teach that, and the sections are all full."

"I can put you on a waiting list for fall."

"Sorry, the sections are all full.

"Sorry."

"Sorry."

It's not the students' fault. I know that some of them have been trying to get this course for a while, and that others were ready to sign up but it was already closed when their registration time opened.

It's not my fault. I volunteered to teach the class this summer in part for the money, of course, but in part because it's something that students need to take. (Yes, this goes against the "put research first! Only teach your specialty!" ethos that we all get told, but I believe in this course and its benefits for students, so I'm teaching it anyway.)

In a way, it's not even the fault of the upper administrators, since after the state budget cuts, they may not have the money to pay for this, either.

It's a living example of Roxie's "Excellence Without Money" in action.

Why the study of history matters: April 12, 1861

In honor of the 150th anniversary of the start of the Civil War, I'd like to say a little something about why the study of history matters.

Now, unlike my esteemed blogfellow Historiann , I'm not a historian, nor do I play one on tv, although I get a little dramatic in class sometimes about historical events. I'm what movie stars or the Mafia would call a "civilian" as far as history is concerned--an interested civilian, one whose idea of a good book is something by Drew Gilpin Faust or Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, but a civilian nonetheless.

When I was in elementary school and we learned about the Civil War, we learned that it was fought over slavery. Slavery was wrong, and the North wanted to put an end to it, and the South wanted to keep their slaves, and they fired on the North at Fort Sumter, and the war was on. We had learned about Harriet Tubman (but not Frederick Douglass), and we admired her work on the Underground Railroad. There were, in fact, some Underground Railroad houses in the area, although I didn't know that at the time.

When I got to high school, though, I was told that slavery was not the cause of the Civil War. No, that was a simplistic, babyish way of looking at the causes. "States' rights" was the issue, plain and simple: a conflict between the federal government and the states over governance. This may have been the same year we learned about "triangular trade" rather than "the slave trade." At any rate, I remember this vividly because it made no sense to me to be told that slavery was just a side issue, basically an economic spat in which the North wanted to deprive the South of its labor force. People were being bought and sold, yet "states' rights" was the issue? That seemed just plain wrong, even to a daydreaming teenager like myself, but history was presented as Holy Writ back then.

Here's why the study of history matters: because otherwise history gets taught as Holy Writ in one immutable narrative strain with no acknowledgment that it is just one of a number of strains and not necessarily the best one. What I realized some years ago is that my history teacher, high school edition, must have been caught up by the revisionist Southern historians and that that was the narrative he was teaching us. We did not know that there were other strands that told a more truthful story, or that historians were always working on finding more information and telling a more truthful story. But that's what studying history teaches you--that the story is always evolving--and that's why I'm glad there are historians.

Online high school education: what happens when they get to college?

I've been wondering recently what happens in online high school classes, since that seems to be the least expensive and least common denominator solution wave of the future for a lot of cash-strapped states. Here's one example from the NY Times Education section:

Jack London was the subject . . . In a high school classroom packed with computers, [the student] read a brief biography of London with single-paragraph excerpts from the author’s works. But the curriculum did not require him, as it had generations of English students, to wade through a tattered copy of “Call of the Wild” or “To Build a Fire.”

[The student], who had failed English 3 in a conventional classroom and was hoping to earn credit online to graduate, was asked a question about the meaning of social Darwinism. He pasted the question into Google and read a summary of a Wikipedia entry. He copied the language, spell-checked it and e-mailed it to his teacher.

Okey-dokey, then! If your teacher is some kind of automated software, I guess you're good to go with that answer. If this is flagged for plagiarism by a real teacher (as the article suggests), how do you have a conversation with the student that is a learning experience rather than a punitive conversation if you can't meet face to face?

I'm concerned that these students who "learn" in this manner are in for a world of hurt when they get to college. What happens if they haven't been taught already that "copy and paste from Wikipedia" isn't acceptable as a methodology?

What happens when they're asked to analyze a text, construct an argument, compare points of view, write a coherent response to a question, or any of those other pesky critical thinking skills that college instructors insist are important and that are, some say, the reason students go to college in the first place?

I can think of a couple of things that could happen:

1) There'll be an even greater culture shock for first-year college students when their skills meet a college-level set of expectations ("But I got all A's in high school!").

2) There'll be an increase in the number of "readiness" or remedial or whatever the college chooses to call them courses, which research suggests (via Dean Dad) don't help as much as they should--unless the state is strapped for cash and decides that remedial courses or extra programs cannot be offered at all, leaving students without support.

3) There'll be pressure on college teachers to "recalibrate" their expectations to the new normal for what high school graduates can do in terms of writing and reading.

4) The students could step up in as-yet unseen ways that might surprise us now. Since they've already taken responsibility for their education by the self-paced learning online, they might be more amenable to the kinds of instruction that we offer.

Thoughts?

The Writing Process: Little White Lies

Profacero has a post up about writing and time. While I agree with most of what she says, I can't completely go the distance on this one: "One, as I have said before, you must allow yourself to estimate time realistically. Perhaps it really will take 120 hours total to write that piece. If so, it is of no use to try to force yourself to take less time; you have to plan to free up all of the 120 hours."

Yes, if it really will take 120 hours, you have to plan for that at one level of your mind, the Rational Writing Brain. RWB allows you to estimate how long certain kinds of writing will take.

But to the Primitive Writing Brain, that 120 hours is an invitation not to start. PWB would say "120 hours? Okay, I'm out of here. No way am I sitting in that chair for 120 hours."

So RWB has to set to work and coax PWB with the Five Stages of Writing every day:

Denial: "Naw, it won't take 120 hours. Why, I'll bet that if you sit down today, you can get 5 pages done! Remember when you wrote X piece so fast? I'll bet it'll be just like that."

Anger: "Yes, it's lousy right now, and it's going to stay lousy unless you get to work and fix it. Get moving!"

Bargaining: "If you just write for the next 20 minutes/200 words, you can get out of the house for a while."

Cheerleading: "See, you're almost finished with this part! You really can do this."

Acceptance: "It's not so bad, after all, and this part is pretty good. You won't have to revise this again tomorrow."

See all the little white lies? Of course it will take 120 hours. Of course it has to be revised tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, but if RWB said that to PWB, PWB would never let the writing alone for the day, let alone pick it up again the next day.

Writing's like making bread. No matter how diligent you are about kneading it, if you don't let it rise or rest at all, you'll never be able to do anything with it.

Want to hear the song? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qTRFPbEpun0

Cursive handwriting (again)

Figure 1. This signature of Treasury Secretary Jack Lew
looks a lot like that of many job applicants.

The Huffington Post reports that some schools are doing away with cursive handwriting. Now, as Sisyphus reminded me a couple of years ago, "no cursive" doesn't mean "no writing"; it just means that students are being taught to print and schools are leaving it at that (I think that's the case; the vagueness of the teachers on this point is annoying).

On one level they have a point. If the students are going to be tested to death--unless Michelle Rhee is in the picture, in which case the teachers cheat or get fired if their students don't get the right test scores*--maybe that half hour a day isn't best spent on practicing writing. I have a couple of observations and questions, as always:

• Students are still going to have to write (as in "not type") essays in classroom situations for a while, so as long as I can read what they write and they can read what I write in response, I don't care whether they print or not.
• Will they be able to read handwriting? The article treats this as some kind of ridiculously trivial skill, like knowing the best way to powder a wig.
• It's faster for me to write in cursive, but maybe that's because I was taught cursive (and retrained myself through calligraphy later on). That makes me a dinosaur, and I accept my scaliness with pride. Maybe instead of "digital natives" we should be talking about "print-writing natives" as the real generational divide.
• Some have said that cursive is needed so that people can sign documents and isn't used otherwise, sort of like that kind of literacy in the 19th century when people knew enough to sign their names but were otherwise illiterate. I don't whether cursive is necessary there, though. In reading job letters over the past few years, I've noticed that a lot of the candidates sign their names with just a squiggle like a sine curve or a couple of loops rather than with a name that you can read. I'm not sure why this is so, or whether it's a trend, but I thought it was interesting.
• I'm puzzled by why we keep wanting students to know less and less. Don't bother memorizing multiplication tables or learning how to make change--who needs it? Don't bother learning another language or having language departments, because Real Americans are proudly ignorant of any language but their own. (Remember the flack John Kerry took because he could speak French?) Don't bother learning to write in cursive, because unless you're going into a profession where people must read handwriting (such as being an academic), it's a useless skill.
• Or it might end up being a kind of class-based skill, the way knowing Latin and Greek were once the marks of a gentleman. The rich need to know how to write in cursive; we worker drones don't have to know it. It sounds silly, but it may be part of that larger trend now toward cutting out "useless" knowledge that doesn't prepare students to get a job, when employers actually want good writing and thinking skills.
• The thing that handwriting of any kind (not just cursive) does best is to allow the brain to make marks on paper through the fingers and thus help the retention of knowledge, as some of us have written about. It's not the same as typing, even on a manual typewriter, which seems to be making a comeback.
• Here's what I don't understand: aren't all the Edumacrats screaming about "hands on! hands on! Learning must be hands on!"? Here is a hands-on type of learning that, let's face it, forces a kind of attention and focus as well as training the brain. Even if they're not in favor of cursive, wouldn't you think they'd like its hands-on qualities?

*Edited because I forgot to credit Historiann for pointing out the scamming outrage of falsified tests that Michelle Rhee instigated.

Grading papers with the iPad

Read the updated post with some technical advice here:
http://notofgeneralinterest.blogspot.com/2011/11/grading-papers-on-ipad-redux.html

Around the web, there've been some posts lately about grading with the iPad, including a couple of good ones by Caleb McDaniel and Michael J. Faris. I was curious about this, so I thought I'd try grading on the iPad and see how it went.

[Update: There's a new post up about this by Janet Johnson at MediaRhetoric.com; she talks about iAnnotate, which she finds easier to use than Word. She also uses some other grading apps, including GradebookPro and EssayGrader, which is sort of like Markin for the iPad.]

My initial thought was to do a whole set the usual way (comments in Word) and a whole set using iAnnotate on the iPad, but I ended up doing just a few on the iPad. It was pretty clear what the strengths and weaknesses were after that. Here's the process:

1. To use iAnnotate for grading, you first need to download the papers (if your students use Word), convert them to .pdf files, and save them to Dropbox. That took about a minute apiece. You don't have to save them to Dropbox if you don't have it; you can transfer them through iTunes, which is the official way to transfer files on the iPad, or through a transfer feature of iAnnotate.

2. Open iAnnotate on the iPad and read the paper. iAnnotate lets you insert comments in little pop-up boxes, use a pencil tool to circle items, underline phrases, and so on.

• You can use your fingers to indicate the text you want highlighted by swiping the text or pressing and holding until the program asks you whether you want to make a note or not.

• If you have a stylus, you can also write on the paper, although even my best efforts at writing letters looked like those of a 4-year-old.
• For each comment, you need to click on the appropriate icon on the sidebar (underline, make a note), click in the right spot in the text, type the note, close the note, and close the annotation menu.

3. Typing on the iPad isn't as straightforward or as fast as typing on a physical keyboard, although it does work. For one thing, if you want to use an apostrophe, you have to go to a different keyboard, although some of the usual contractions (it's, I'll, etc.) will insert themselves automatically.

4. At the end, you can upload the file back to Dropbox or mail it directly to the student. There's no "save" or "save as" feature (or at least I haven't been able to find one), but iAnnotate saves the annotated file automatically. If you like to save the graded papers with a different filename, as I do, you'll have to change the filename on your regular computer.

Note: If your students email you their papers in .pdf format and you mark them up in iAnnotate, you won't be able to save that version to Dropbox. Dropbox only accepts the annotated version if it originated in Dropbox, apparently a known issue with the two programs.

5. I used the Typewriter comment feature to write the final comment. [Note: See the updated post (above) about using Note instead.]

6. If you email the file, there are two options: one "flattens" the annotations, which means that the student sees a little yellow comment box with a number and the comments are down below, and one that the student should be able to see using the pop-ups.

Advantages and Disadvantages:

1. Draw. Most of the information I've seen lists "not carrying around a stack of papers," "no messy writing in the margins," etc. as an advantage, but since I'm collecting and returning papers electronically, that's not an issue.

2. Advantage: It's kind of cool to grade on the iPad. If I have the iPad with me anyway, I might as well carry some grading to do.

3. Disadvantage: No Word autotext on the iPad. No magic keystrokes that insert text (Alt-I-A-X). That makes a huge difference, since I use it to explain common problems and can then spend a lot more time on substantive issues.

4. Advantage: No computer to lug around. On the other hand, I have an old-ish netbook that, like the iPad, fits in my pocketbook, so it's really kind of a draw if portability is the issue.

5. Disadvantage: Grading takes longer. Total average time: if N = the amount of time that it takes to grade a paper in Word or on paper, the iPad version took me N + 9 minutes, on average. I did the math: 9 extra minutes apiece x 30 papers = time I could spend doing something else.

6. Disadvantage: Typing is less intuitive, and I noticed that my shoulders were getting all hunched up with the effort to type and not make mistakes.

7. Draw: The CMS my university uses does not play well at all with the iPad; there's no way to scroll down or upload the papers to the dropbox space in the CMS. On the other hand, if you're emailing papers back anyway, this may not be a problem.

Professor Angriette from Angryville

The important things I want to say aren't things that I can be articulate about, such as Bob Herbert's great final column about what's wrong with this country (does GE making $5.1 billion in profits and paying no taxes ring a bell?) and the attack on William Cronon, about which you can read good posts at Tenured Radical, Historiann, Bardiac, Roxie's World, Dean Dad, Anthony Grafton at The New Yorker, and Paul Krugman at The New York Times (h/t Historiann for the links). I would have to change the name of this blog to Professor Angriette from Angryville and buy a megaphone to yell at all the idiocy mendacity, since even quivering like Lionel Barrymore can't cut it as a statement of rage anymore.
Anyway. Later on I'll write a nice, quiet post about writing or pouring rain, both of which are constants here right now.

Big Love finale: my heck, yes!

I know this is off-topic, but I can't help writing about it as a way of getting it out of my head. If you either don't care about Big Love or haven't seen the finale yet and don't want spoilers, you don't want to read this.

Mark Olsen and Will Scheffer have already discussed why they ended the series as they did, so this is just a few random bullets of reaction.

• How early in this episode did you realize that something dire was going to happen to Bill? The Godfather-style smile with oranges was a big tip-off, of course, but really, every time Bill starts to get out from under his problems, he goes and invites another peck of trouble by angering the civil authorities, the church, his wives, the D.A., Juniper Creek, or someone else who's unimpressed with his pronouncements. See under "hubris": Bill Henrickson.
• Bill is an Everyman with a vision, and although a lot of people disliked his character, it seemed to me that Bill Paxton did well at portraying an everyman who's misguided but has a strong set of beliefs, however wrongheaded we think those are. Also, he's handy with tools, and it was one of the many nice touches in the show that he'd head for something he could handle and fix in the material world when his spiritual world was going awry. Barb wants the priesthood? Salt the patio. Barb is pulling away? Put a towbar on Lois's car. (By the way, this season had far too little of Nicki's Handy Home Repairs and Appliance Hauling compared with previous years.)
• Speaking of hubris, Spouse commented that he thought the whole series had been about hubris, which if you think about it, would make Bill a tragic hero of sorts. Does he achieve tragic status? With his vision of Emma Smith and family, Bill does achieve a kind of anagnorisis and is able to act on it just before he dies, explaining his revelation to Ben and Don and asking Barb for her blessing. Spouse pointed out that, like Joseph Smith, Bill never does get to the promised land but is murdered before he can get there.
• The Emma Smith figure puzzled me last season and in the finale at first, since she was vehemently opposed to polygamy and was vocal about it, too. Olsen and Scheffer said somewhere that that was her function--to draw attention to the flaws and give voice to the dissent about it.
• I didn't miss the characters who weren't brought back--not Joey, Wanda, and their baby (who creepily never grew to toddlerhood in 2-3 years) but were sent to the Big Mexican Compound in the Sky nor Teeny nor any of the multitude of Juniper Creekers. It was a finale, not a family reunion.
• Speaking of children, all of the Henrickson brood was seen from time to time, but with the exception of Our Spokesman Wayne, they were pretty much seen and not heard (except for singing) and never seemed to need a babysitter. Think about it, though: if the show still focused on minor domestic dramas like who's going to drive the kids to school or who's going to pick up a costume for Teeny, which was the material of the early seasons, we wouldn't be watching it because the show is done with those logistical points--and so are we.
• Nor did I think that some kind of dramatic justice demanded that Alby be the one to kill Bill. Having Carl do it--and after Bill had performed one of his rare unselfless acts and fulfilled one of his promises, for a change--made sense in that Bill was a repudiation of all that Carl stood for. Also, Bill doesn't lose to Juniper Creek, but he does lose to randomness, and for someone who mistakenly thinks he has life under control as much as Bill does, it's a perfect undercutting of his control one last time.
• Lois and Frank. Frank's recollections about their early life together--living in the trailer--didn't mention one thing: he was already married to someone else at the time, and Lois was his second wife. Is there a setting-up-housekeeping period in polygamy when the husband and new wife go off together, or was Frank being tactful (Frank! tactful!), or did the writers forget that Lois wasn't the first wife?

Your thoughts?