Simpleology, a courseware provider, is offering a blogging course free to people who link to their site. It looks like they’re beta-testing it to see whether they can sell it. I figure, I’ll try it out and see what it’s all about. What’s the worst that could happen?
I’ll let you know what I think once I’ve had a chance to check it out. Meanwhile, go grab yours while it’s still free.
Update: To be honest, I’m not all that happy with what I’ve seen so far — a big-ass sales page for a health course, and once I managed to find the dashboard for the blogging course, I find I have to do their “simpleology” course — which looks like self-help flim-flam to me — before I can unlock the blogging course. Feh.
Every semester, I spend a lot of time explaining the term paper assignments to students. I talk about them when I hand out my syllabus, I spend a good half-hour discussing the assignment about 3 weeks into the course, and I revisit the topic several times up until the last week before the due date.
Every time I bring it up, I ask if students have any questions. The questions I get are always about teh same damn thing: formatting. “Does it have to be typed?” “What size margins should I use?” “What style do you want the references in?”
I can only imagine that other professors and/or high school teachers hammer students over formatting, without paying much attention to their ideas — which are, ostensibly, what we assign papers to help students get at and express.
I’ve never once, in 5 years of teaching, been asked a question about ideas.
Ideas are not more important than content, any more than respiration is more important than circulation — formatting is part of the expression of ideas. A reference is a piece of data — it helps answer the question, “how does the author know what s/he claims to know?” A section heading or a footnote is part of the process by which an argument is structured and developed — they aren’t extras.
At the same time, students’ (and teachers’?) emphasis on form seems to miss the point that good presentation without ideas isn’t any better than good ideas badly presented. Is it any wonder that much of what we read is a vapid rehashing not of the course materials but of Wikipedia entries. I mean, if the quality of ideas doesn’t matter, what does it matter where they came from – as long as it’s nicely formatted and search-engine friendly?
Here’s my advice for students: consider formatting not as something separate from your ideas, but as a part of them. Your entire paper is a presentation of ideas — and your design choices are one of the ideas being presented. Every reference, every footnote, even the margins and line-spacing should serve that end.
That doesn’t mean to ignore the standards — APA for a psych paper, MLA for a lit paper, etc. Those standards exist because they are tried-and-tested ways for ideas to be expressed well. But learn them as ideas, not as meaningless frills.
And ask a professor how to write a persuasive argument in your discipline once in a while. That matters, too.
One of my colleagues at Savage Minds posted the trailer for the upcoming Indiana Jones movie, drawing special attention to the last line. For all the part-time teachers out there, this one’s for you!
Last August, I wrote about the high price of textbooks and what I feel is an exploitative relationship between authors and publishers on one hand and the students we serve on the other. An officer of the Text and Academic Authors Association (TAA), to which I belong, came across the post and asked me to write up my argument for the TAA Newsletter. The piece is coming out in print next month, but is already up on the TAA website. The post itself is in the member’s only section of the site, but I’ll post it to my portfolio once it’s out in hard copy.
My argument is this: academic writers have a higher obligation than just to make royalties, and that’s to disseminate knowledge. We are incredibly generous in sharing our work with each other — most academic journals pay nothing at all, most academic publishers pay little or no royalties — and need I add that I wasn’t paid anything by the TAA, nor would I have been in just about any other academic association’s newsletter.
When it comes to sharing information with students, though, we demand they pony up. Top dollar, even — it’s not at all unusual for an intro-level textbook to top $100 US. I blame the publishers — especially the practice of including essentially useless test banks, CD-ROMs, supplements, etc., as well as insisting on full-color printing, flashy covers, particularly useless online extensions, and so on. Many fellow TAA members, however, blame students, for supporting the massive trade in used text books. The availability of used books, they argue, forces textbook publishers to step up the revision cycle and add more and more useless junk to the texbook package to differentiate their offerings.
I call BS. If the used book market ceased to exist tomorrow, I very much doubt the price of textbooks would change one whit. Used book sales have been a part of the book trade since there was a book trade. The sale of used books is one of the best established exceptions to an author’s rights under US copyright law. There’s always been a trade in used books, and as long as there’s books, there always will be.
More importantly, the cost of textbooks is a huge barrier to education for our poorest students I’ve had dozens of students in my 5 years as a teacher that simply would not be able to remain in school if not for the ability to buy the books they needed used and sell them back at the end of the semester.
And why shouldn’t they? What do most textbooks offer students? Some TAA members believe we should encourage students to think of their books as lifelong resources. That’s a laugh! First off, most students don’t read their textbooks when they’re in the class, let alone once the class is over. The average textbook is ponderous, boring, dry, and sucked clean of any vestige of human warmth.
And no wonder! The link is to an article about high school textbooks, and will scare you senseless. The same four companies mentioned in the article publish most of the college textbooks, too, and while they don’t have to go through he big state selection committees that are responsible for the dumbing down and blanding out of high school texts, I’d bet the mindset is more or less the same.
I think we owe it to our students and to society as a whole to make sure we offer quality textbooks that students can afford. There’s no reason textbooks can’t be made the same way trade paperbacks are made — to be sold for $18.00, or even $30.00 to subsidize an instructor’s manual. Just the ANTH 101 classes in a year at my community college would use more books than most literary fiction sells — it’s absolutely not a question of making up suitable volume. Strip away the flashy production values and the useless extras, and give students book they’ll not only be able to afford, but one they might even think about keeping.
I have a cheap laptop with Vista Home Basic (VHB) on it. VHB doesn’t include the fancy interface, Aero Glass, that is the hallmark of the Vista OS. Which is fine, I don’t need that — I think I’m more comfortable with the way I’ve been using Widows since ’97, anyway.
So, lately it’s been getting sower and slower. Like, I’d hit the “Start” button and the “rolling donut” (the little icon that tells you the PC is working on something and you should wait a while) would pop up for 15 seconds, and then the start menu would open and I’d click something and the rolling donut would come up for another 15 seconds and then the window for the program I’ve just opened would come up and there’s that rolling donut again and 30 seconds later the program window fills and I click something and the rolling donut comes up again…
So I’m looking through the processes and I see “dwm.exe” and it’s using over 50 MB — more than anything but Firefox (which is a huge memory hog, we all know). I Google it and turns out it’s the “Desktop Window Manager” and all it does is the “glass” effect in Aero Glass. I’m not using Aero, though, since WHB doesn’t have it. Right?
Turns out, wrong. I checked the “Personalize” setting and apparently the color picker, which I had used to change my window frames from the default light blue to a glossy black, causes dwm.exe to work overtime, because as soon as I reverted to the default the whole system picked up. The Desktop Window Manager dropped 49 of those 50 MB of memory it was using, and seriously windows started flying open.
The upshot is, if you’re using Vista Home Basic, and your system is running slow, make sure you’re using the Home Basic display settings. Even though it doesn’t technically include Aero Glass, it apparently includes some parts of Aero, and they can consume a lot of resources.
Here’s something strange: When you’re writing an email in Outlook 2007, you’d think the “text format” setting would be under the “Format Text” tab, right?
You’d be wrong. It’s actually under the “Options” tab. According to Microsoft engineers*, this is strictly to keep you on your toes and prevent you from becoming complacent.
*Note: The opinions expressed herein may or may not represent the opinions of actual Microsoft engineers, none of whom were consulted in any way other than presumably in the writing of this post.
Are you a teacher? I designed these buttons a couple of years ago and have been selling them via CafePress ever since. I’ve never really promoted them, but somehow people found out about them and buy a couple here, a couple there. I think they’re pretty funny. If you’re at all good at what you do, you’ve probably been accused of warping students’ minds a time or two — revel in it!
Each button is 2 inches across, and they’re nicely made. They cost $2 US, or you can get 10 for $19.00 or, if you’re feeling really wild, you can get 100 for $180.00. Get one for everyone in your department! I’m not getting rich off these or anything — I just think people who teach might enjoy them.
This blog started in political disappointment. I started blogging in the days running up to and immediately after the 2000 election that essentially destroyed America. I hated seeing the Democrats going after the staunchest defenders of progressive values in attacking the Nader campaign, I hated seeing Bush take the White House despite his clear lack of an electoral mandate (losing by a loophole in the rules is even more unsatisfying than losing outright!).
In the years since, I’ve gotten more and more cynical about politics and especially about politicians. It’s a media game, and the winner is the corporation (because that’s what candidates for the big positions are these days) with the bet media campaign, not the best political campaign.
I’ve barely taken an interest in this year’s presidential campaign. I’m not a Democrat, so I didn’t caucus — but I have no strong feelings about any of the candidates, except I’d rather it wasn’t Hilary Clinton. (Aside: Clinton was the first female member of the board of directors at Wal-Mart. Wal-Mart has a long history of abuses on both the labor front and the gender front. Either Clinton didn’t care, or she wasn’t able to effect any real change — either way, that’s bad news for a presidency.) But basically I feel that it’s impossible to tell anything about a candidate from their campaign — like any product, the campaign highlights their best features, exaggerates them, and shuts down entirely any negative reactions. Given the huge amount of corporate and lobbyist wealth that’s necessary to mount a bid for the presidency, how could anyone get so far as the primaries without already being deeply compromised?
All that said, this video gave me chills:
For the first time, I’m starting to feel like there’s a real person, a Mensch in Yiddish, running for office. Obama’s record isn’t spotless, and he’s definitely reaching for the center which hardly bodes well for a progressive like me, but there’s something authentic and genuine there that these singers and musicians (admittedly, they’re pros) have tapped into.
At this point, the only thing I hope is that another Republican doesn’t get to the White House. The Republican Party has become so detached from reality, I don’t even know how they can manage to get through the day, let alone exercise real power. I’m resigned as always to the fact that I’m going to disagree with whoever gets elected, that there will be plenty of call for active opposition to the policies of whoever is the next President.
But I wouldn’t mind feeling inspired a little, too — to feel as if, whatever our differences, there was a President who felt a little hopeful, a little compassionate, and a little bit driven in the White House.
I guess that’s an endorsement of Obama, for whatever that’s worth.
Update: Here’s the roiginal unaltered speech (the part highlighted in the video above starts at about 10:50):
I’m mulling the idea of starting a new site devoted to writing and technology. I’ve got a name, a likely domain name, and am building a nice chunk of content to launch with. The idea is to discuss the particular technology needs of writers (of all sorts) using the web to promote their work and develop their audience.
The question is, am I better off starting a new blog devoted solely to that niche or to start integrating that content into this site?
The advantage to posting it here is that I already have a decent amount of traffic, I have a good position in Google, and I wouldn’t be splitting my attention and time off to yet another project.
The advantage of doing it as its own site is that all the material on the site would be focused on the same topic, so readers interested in the latest writing software wouldn’t have to read about my research interests or political positions or random musings on what goes on in Amazon boardroom when they name e-readers. Also, the tone of the new content is much more straight-forward and serious than here (which isn’t to say it’s not personal — it’s the same voice, but different tone and focus) so their wouldn’t be any dissonance as I jump from practical advice to joking around. Also, any ads or sponsorships could be much more tightly focused.
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what direction my career is headed in and whether I’m happy with that. At the moment, I have a kind of split career. In one career, I teach college students about important stuff like race, class, gender, and culture. In the other career, I write for several websites and other outlets, including some commercial writing. Both make me happy while I’m doing them, and both are incredibly rewarding.
But I’m stalled in teaching. I’ve made some great big financial mistakes that mean I’m probably never going to get my PhD; nobody at my university even knows who I am anymore. I’ve chugged along at my dissertation for years, but for the last year or so it’s gotten harder and harder to motivate myself to work on it because, to be honest, neither my heart nor my soul is in it any more.
That should be sad, but it’s not, because I don’t think I ever really wanted to be a professor; I think I’ve always wanted to be a teacher. What’s the difference, you ask? Well, a professor does research, writes books, gives presentations — and occasionally, when everything else is done, teaches a class. A teacher, on the other hand, teaches — whether in a classroom, on a website, in a book, whatever.
The reality of the academic market is, I’m not going to be a professor at a “top school”, even with a PhD, because I care too much about teaching. Which is fine, except I have a family to feed and a life to live, and I can’t do that on an adjunct’s salary.
In my other career, I’m a writer. I’m pretty good at it, I think — I’ve gotten my fair share of diggs and trackbacks and thankful comments on my writing on the web, and my off-line writing gets a pretty good response. At lifehack.org alone, I have upwards of a million readers a month. And I have a good understanding of the marketing and relationship-building strategies that matter for writers in the new media. More and more I think this is where I should be focusing my efforts.
Especially since BlogWorld Expo in November. There I saw an entire professional world unfolding before my eyes, and a little glimpse of what the future holds. I mean, I’ve been blogging since 2000, but it wasn’t until BlogWorld that I really saw that one could build a career on the Internet without being a coder or a designer.
So now Affiliate Summit West is heading to town. That’s one of the nice things about living in Las Vegas — conferences come right to your doorstep! Of course, the downside is, you need a lot of money to go to them — Affiliate Summit is $1449 for the whole conference, and a couple hundred just to have a look around.
But John Chow is giving away a free full pass and a couple of free floor passes, so all of a sudden it’s worth thinking about going. I have to admit, I have a really hard time wrapping my head around affiliate marketing. Not the concept itself, which is pretty straightforward — you link to products your audience would enjoy, and if they click through and spend money, you get a piece. But few sites do this well, and from the outside, doing it well seems to be such a large job that it would eclipse the actual writing that’s supposed to be the star of the show.
I’ve made a goal for this year: By the fall semester, I plan to cut my teaching load in half. And I plan to do that not just by replacing the pay those classes bring in but by doubling it. That means, effectively, I have to hit $25000 in non-teaching income by September, which is very doable. (I’ve already accounted for about 1/3 of that with existing work, actually).
Which means that the time is now to figure out how this stuff all works — affiliate marketing, social networking, contextual advertising, all of it. If I want to write for a living, I have to figure out how to live by writing. BlogWorld was a step in the right direction — it gave me a real big push towards bringing this all together. Something like Affiliate Summit West would be a great next step!
