I put two posts up at lifehack.org this week; there’s a third in the pipe which I assume will be posted tomorrow. The goal is to post three times a week, but we’re having some small difficulties coordinating that since the editor, Leon, lives in Australia which is actually in the future, while I can only post in the present. Damn International Date Line!
The posts this week were:
I’m pretty happy with the positive response both have gotten — lots of comments, trackbacks, and diggs which tells me that what I’m writing is reaching people. Coming up, a follow-up to the Google Reader article, a piece on writing research papers, another on note-taking, and a few other things I’m still working out.
Stay tuned…
Well, maybe not “easy”, per se, unless by “easy” you mean “really, really hard”.
This week was the first week of the summer session of my women’s studies class, “Gender, Race, and Class”. While I’ve taught about a half-dozen summer sessions of anthropology at the community college, this is my first summer session at the university and my first in women’s studies. Summer classes are a ton of work — class prep every day, unmotivated students, only a couple weeks between intros and mid-terms, and then again between mid-terms and finals. They tend to be breathless, jus-in-time affairs.
So, naturally, I use them to test out new ideas and teaching practices. This summer I’m experimenting with student blogging; each student has to post twice a week and comment on three other posts on the class website. I’m doing this for two reasons: First, because I want to shake up the typical teacher-student relationship where I find out all sort of interesting and useful information about each of my students but they never find out anything about each other. Which is a shame: especially in a course about gender, race, and class, the diverse experiences and perspectives of their fellow students is easily the best resource they could draw on. Blogging will, I hope, provide a channel for the sharing of this resource. Secondly, the field of women’s studies is based on a pedagogy of public engagement. Blogging forces students to write for a public audience, which means they have to give at least cursory thought to their relationship with the rest of their society.
So far, it’s been pretty successful, though all most of my students have written is their introductions. And the class itself has been moving pretty well, though I somewhat evilly assigned some really difficult reading to slog through the first week. Approaching the start of every new semester is worrisome, because each group of students has its own personality, and you never know when you’re going to get a class that, for whatever reason, just doesn’t work. Every professor has, at some point or another, no matter how good or popular they are. So it’s been a relief that this class has, so far, been pretty responsive, and there’s already been some pretty productive in-class discussion.
I’d be happy to hear from other professors who have integrated blogging into their courses; I’ve done a lot of web-searching and mostly turned up K-12 educators who use blogs, not many folk in higher ed. If that’s you, please drop me a line!
Way back at the turn of the century, when the Web was still 1.0 and a ragtag band of ragged IT staffers thought they could make a mint going virtual, I got to repeatedly experience the joys (please note intense sarcasm!) of web conferencing, dot-bomb style. We had the marketing and sales office in NYC (where I worked), the data center in New Jersey, and believe it or not, coders in Bulgaria. And every few days, we got to do web conferencing with jumpy blurry webcam images and scratchy audio and really … high … latency.
Nowaday, of course, the Web is all two-point-oh! and your Grandma Skypes you and you can actually podcast in front of a live video audience and web conferencing has, no doubt, gotten much better. We’re all 21st century and stuff, now. But I think it would do us all well to remember that, just a few short years ago, the world was a very different place, where you could barely even make out the voices of your ex-KGB coders in Bulgaria, let alone work out what they ere talking about.
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Starting next week, I will be blogging at lifehack.org on topics related to productivity, organization, learning, and generally living the Good Life. I’ll still maintain this site for more general musings and updates. I’m very excited about this opportunity and am looking forward to dealing with some of the topics I’ve dealt with here in a more general way. Check it out!
When I graduated from college, I got myself a 6-month work visa and headed to London, which I heartily recommend to everyone. Interestingly, I met hardly any actual English people, or even British people, while I lived there – even though I ended up working in the National Gallery. Well, the café in the National Gallery.
Instead, I met mostly other travelers like myself, people who for one reason or another had caught the travel bug and headed out. You’d expect the folks at the hostel where I lived 4 of the 6 months I was in the UK to be mostly foreign, of course, but the staff where I worked was mostly foreigners, too. Some were citizens of Commonwealth countries taking advantage of Britain’s ongoing relationship with its ex-colonies. A handful were Americans like me on short-term work exchange programs. And most of the rest were European Union members spending a year or two in London after getting their A-levels (the European version of a high school diploma, except you learn stuff), mostly to learn English.
For most of my friends in London, England was a gateway to their future careers, a stepping-stone to the rest of their lives. They’d all learned English in school, but it was formal, “I’d like a room with two double beds, please” English, not the kind of stuff that real people talk about in their real lives – the stuff that they would be expected to talk about as workers in the mostly English-speaking global economy. London promised the opportunity to hang out, talk about music and shopping and just everyday stuff. Some of my friends and passing acquaintances (you have a lot of intense 2day friendships when you live in a hostel) went to formal English schools, but most didn’t – they learned by talking.
And by doing – I worked with, and for a while supervised, easily a half-dozen folk from France, Italy, Spain, Turkey, and elsewhere who spoke almost no English. With their livelihoods in very expensive London on the line, they learned fast – often through trial and error, and just as often by listening to the chit-chat of everyone else. This, of course, led to some odd juxtapositions – the gorgeous Swedish blonde who spoke with a Cockney lilt, for instance, or the Italian women who picked up my New Jersey friend’s way of saying “cwowfee”. Such a mix of accents, of cultures, of ways of living in and understanding the world!
Frankly, if I were not already a native English speaker, and I were that age again, I can think of nothing that would keep me away from London to improve my English. London is an astonishing city – even though I’ve lived in New York City and San Francisco and various cities in Europe, London is the only true “world city” I can think of, where members of every culture you can imagine are present everywhere you look.
Except, of course, the British.
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Read/Write Web has a great list of online applications for students. Online applications are generally free (at least for basic service, and upgraded services tend to be cheap), fairly easy to use, and most importantly are available wherever you have access to a computer. Since students tend to move from their dorm room to computer labs to classrooms to friends’ dorms to off-campus homes to Internet cafes to their parents’ houses and so on, the fact that your work is just a login away wherever you happen to be can be a real help. Here’s a tip: many of these services have plugins for Google’s iGoogle customizable homepage (as well as for similar services like PageFlakes and NetVibes) so you can construct a single “dashboard” where you can access your documents, your calendar, your notes, and so on.
Universities are complex. Needlessly complex. The modern university represents an accretion of over a thousand years of tradition – why else do you think you are expected to dress like a medieval scribe for graduation?
A lot of students try to navigate blindly, responding to the sometimes almost random demands of the system, hoping at any given moment to find someone – anyone! – who can tell them what the heck they’re supposed to do next. Although a lot of schools offer study skills courses to their incoming students, few offer a college survival course to help students figure out how everything fits together.
And it’s far from self-evident – even the vocabulary of the university is weird: there’s registrars and proctors and bursars and provosts and… Who are all these people, and what do they want from you? And more to the point, what are they there to do for you?
Because that is, after all, their job: to facilitate the process of getting you educated. It’s crucial that you learn how the system works at your school, not only because it will help you make smart decisions about your education but because it will help you plan for your life after college as well.
For instance, do you know the difference between an adjunct professor, an associate professor, a visiting professor, an assistant professor, and a full professor? In the classroom, the difference is negligible: they are all people with a strong background in the disciplines they are teaching, and while a full professor might have more experience than an adjunct (or not – some people adjunct their whole lives while pursuing other, non-teaching work) they’re basically all able to provide expert instruction in the topics they teach. But full, assistant, and associate professors are full-time employees of the school, while visiting and adjunct professors are temporary – visiting professors are usually on a fixed term, while adjuncts are hired each semester or year on a short-term contract. There’s a good chance that an adjunct or visiting professor won’t be there a year or two after you graduate – which might matter quite a bit if you decide to go on to graduate school and need recommendations. Full professors, on the other hand, tend to be the senior scholars at the school – tenured, with several publications, and well-connected in the field; a recommendation for a graduate school, scholarship, or job from a full professor will probably carry a lot more weight than one from an adjunct.
It’s important that you make sure you have strong connections with the senior faculty in your department – which doesn’t mean you should avoid the junior and temporary faculty, but it does mean that you should be careful about making strong ties only with junior scholars. A little research on the department website or in your class catalog will reveal the rank of your professors – it doesn’t hurt to check into them a little.
Likewise, ask someone – perhaps your advisor – to help you figure out what all the bizarre job titles you’re confronted with mean in the real world, or look them up on the Internet. Take an evening and actually read some of your college handbook to see what the different divisions of the school are and who the important players are. Call offices and see what they do. The point is to find out what the university has to offer you and how to take advantage of it, rather than settling for whatever services you happen to come across.
Over the next few weeks, if I’m approved, I’ll be experimenting with a new-ish service (new to me, anyway) called Blogsvertise. Here’s how it works: Blogsvertise gets paid to promote some product or service. Blogsvertise selects appropriate blogs to write about the product or service. I write a post in which I mention the product or service a certain number of times, with the link provided. I am under no obligation to endorse the product or service, simply to mention them and provide a link. I get paid a little something, which is good.
I’ve thought hard about the ethics of this, and I’ve decided that I can be comfortable with this provided I do nothing to deceive my readers (either one of you!). I will not endorse any product I do not or would not use, and will be very clear when I’m being paid to mention a product. The way I see it is like this: Blogsvertise is going to provide me with more or less regular writing prompts (prompts are assignments writers give each other to challenge themselves to come up with creative ways of dealing with a topic, or to help break through writer’s block, or simply to give themselves a challenge and practice their writing chops). That they’re going to pay me makes their prompts more attractive, but that’s it — it doesn’t create an obligation to give them or their clients any editorial control over my writing here. To their credit, Blogsvertise understands this and is very clear about the limits they must stick to.
So we’ll see how it turns out. I will still write on my own topics, when I have something to say — like I’ve been doing for 7+ years at my old site, One Man’s Opinion (static archive, at Savage Minds, and at ThinkNaughty, my research blog.
My, my, we do hate the idea of outlining, don’t we? Most people think of an outline as a rigid straightjacket hampering the flow of true creativity. But guess what – the writers you admire most for their creativity almost without fail are outliners (and those that aren’t are lying – they most likely keep an outline in their heads and trust their memories to keep it straight). The reason is simple – an outline takes most of the work of organizing and structuring their writing off their shoulders, which means they are free to actually be creative.
A good outline is a map to your goals – and like any good map, as you follow along you’ll see new and often more interesting ways to get where you’re going. But you wouldn’t set off on a long journey without any map at all, would you? (The popularity of online services like Google Maps, Mapquest, and Yahoo Maps suggests not.) An outline serves primarily as a reminder, helping you to keep the end goal in sight and to evaluate your progress along the way. It’s also a pretty good charm against writer’s block – many prolific writers say that when they don’t know what to write next, they just check their outline and crank out pages, however crappy. Knowing what to do next helps bring them around to their next point, even if they have to detour a little to get there. There’s always editing (remember?).
Of course, in high school, you were probably given a complicated set of Roman numerals, capital and lower-case letters, and numbers and sub-sets and superscripts and… Forget all that. An outline doesn’t have to be any more complex than a list of points you want to cover and the order you want to cover them in. The more detail you capture at the beginning of your project, though, the easier it will be to develop your work later on. Once you have a list of topics, it’s a good idea to go back and fill in some sub-topics, even sub-sub-topics. I use a program called Keynote for this, even though the author stopped updating it two years ago. Keynote is an outliner program, with a nice text editor built in, so I can write the body of my article directly into my outline. It’s a process of gradual accumulation: I list the topics I want to write on, then add sub-topics and sub-sub-topics, then crank through them one by one, writing a paragraph or two for each sub-topic. Then I export the whole thing to Word (from the “File†menu), clean it up, and add a line here or there where the transition from one point to the next seems rocky.
But you don’t need specialized software to make a decent outline. A piece of paper with some scribbled notes is good, too. The point is to have something, some idea of what you want to write and how you want to write it, before you start writing in earnest. You’ll find that once the outline is done, most of the thought process is finished – the rest of the paper just flows into place. And because you’ve already worried about what facts are needed to support each part of your argument, you don’t have to worry about it when you’re writing – which means you can focus on crafting wonderful, creative sentences.
A conspiracy is afoot, my friends. Microsoft is in on it, for sure, but they’re only the public face of what may be the vastest, most insidious plot to undermine America’s credibility ever carried out. I’m pretty sure the North Koreans are in on it, and the Teachers’ Union. And MTV, definitely. Their plan: through the cunning manipulation of word processing software, particularly the spell-checking function, they hope to make Americans look stupid and awkward in front of the rest of the world.
And it’s working!
Here’s how it works: you finish a paper in the bleary-eyed dead of night, mere hours before it’s due. You hit the spell-check button, and run through your errors, generally hitting “changeâ€, “changeâ€, “change†and on and on without really looking at the errors spell-check claims to have found or the changes it recommends. When you’re done, maybe you take a quick glance at the page – no red squiggles? Good, you’re golden.
Except, you’re not. Spell-check will catch the most obvious errors, but it’s fairly blind to matters of context and subtlety. All it does is check each word against a list of known words – if a word in your text isn’t on its list, it suggests the closest match. For most college-level writing, you will be using words that will not be on its list – these words have to be added to the dictionary manually, which requires a little more attention than the average last-minute proofreader can muster. More than that, though, spell-check doesn’t see a problem with a word that’s misspelled, as long as it still spells something. (Word 2007 is supposed to have some ability to catch these words, but the program is still so new that the scope of its abilities aren’t clear. Plus, most people will be using pre-Office 2007 software – either Office 2003 or XP, or WordPerfect, Works, or OpenOffice, which do not handle contextual misspellings.)
This is where you start to look stupid. If you write “Their are three things you should have in you’re bag at all timesâ€, spell-check thinks that’s fine. Your human audience, however – your professor, maybe fellow students, maybe a college admissions committee, or whomever – won’t think you’re fine, they’ll think you’re a bit slow, lacking a basic command of the English language. This is especially embarrassing if English is your native language!
The conspirators are counting on this – they want you to look silly, and nothing looks sillier than not knowing the difference between “are†and “ourâ€. But, of course, you claim that you actually do know the difference – and you probably do, but what good does that do you? Prospective employers won’t ask, nor will grad school admission boards, nor anyone else.
Meanwhile, the folks at Microsoft and their Korean co-conspirators are laughing and laughing, even as they shift their investment portfolios out of American companies and into Indian and Turkish corporations – knowing that the Turks and Indians will be more than prepared to step in with clearly-written language when America crumbles under the weight of its own mockability.
There are, of course, things we can do to prevent this future from unfolding and to stop this global conspiracy in its tracks. First of all, know your tools; understand how spell-check works and how to make changes to its functionality. For instance, if there’s words you mistype a lot, did you know you can add them to Word’s auto-correct list? (Other programs that auto-correct likely have the same ability.) Some years ago, I worked in a museum. Because of my let’s call it “unorthodox†typing style, I tend to mistype the word “museum†as “msueumâ€. Kind of a problem, right? No big deal, though – I just opened Word’s options and added my goofy spelling to the list, requesting that every time I type that abomination, Word simply replace it with “museumâ€. From then on, all was well in the world: I received medals and plaques for excellence in spelling the name of the organization consistently, the museum received grants and gifts because of the fine treatment of its name on grant applications and other communications, overnight art became literally the single most important thing to the world’s citizens. That’s why there’s no more reality shows.
OK, back to reality now: another thing you can do to prevent the imminent outsourcing of your future jobs to Nigeria, where well-formed English flows like sweetened tea from the tongues of the locals, is to… OK, you’re not going to like this. So sit down, grab your comfort blanket, and take a deep breath. The other thing is to finish your work at least a day early and then proofread it before it’s due. Better yet, have someone you trust – that is, someone who can tell you how dumb you are without it hurting your feelings; this is an excellent test of the strength and quality of your relationships, by the way – read your work and tell you what mistakes you’ve made. Note: this only works if your reader can spell.
If it were only your future at risk, I wouldn’t bother here. Surely some smart student in your classes will realize what you’re doing to yourself and position herself or himself accordingly to make sure that your goals and dreams land squarely on her or his shoulders. That’s no big deal (for her or him, anyway – it might upset you a bit, but that’s competition for you. What’re you gonna do?). Unfortunately, with the future of the free world hanging on your willingness to create well-crafted prose, I feel obligated to intervene here. If you want Bill Gates, Kim Jong-Il, and the 14-year old Chinese kids who will write the future’s business requirement documents, requests for proposal, and grants for a tenth of what you’d charge to win, by all means, keep using spell-check as your only line of defense against typos. But if you care at all about the world you’re in, please, I beg you – your country begs you! – be just a little more careful with the typos.
Special super-bonus reading: 10 flagrant grammar mistakes that make you look stupid
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