Techsophist

Why it’s hard to finish unpacking books

Sun, 27 Jul 2008 06:13:22 -0500

I may have only one cat now, but she is doing the work of three.

Taking the charm with you

Sat, 26 Jul 2008 08:24:20 -0500

Well, I did it. I moved out of that charming little Tudor house so close to campus to a recently remodeled 3/2/2 duplex. Yes, to some extent I was bought by the attached garage with opener, the vaulted ceilings, the double-thermopane windows, and the icemaker, all of which I heard tell of but had never experienced in my own home except for the vaulted ceiling, which I had with a skylight in the best apartment ever from my fabulous landlord in Bowling Green, Ohio. So here I am, in a practically new carpeted house. I’m down to one cat, Sophie, but she has adjusted well. Pierre, the butter-striped cat, was taken back to Ohio by my son, Ted, and I have photographic evidence that being back in Ohio a block-and-a-half from his old place suits him. They say he is calmer now and may not need kitty xanac after all. There’s a photo of Pierre reunited with his favorite futon in the rest of this post.

The real benefit, and one I hope will translate into an even more productive writing year, is that I haven’t needed my inhaler since I shut the door for the last time on the old house. I know that you really need a test to know if a house has mold in the walls (or the thrice-flooded basement), but my documented mold allergies combined with this complete turnaround is something to think about.

A little bit of landlord irony here. I didn’t renew because the landlord had promised replacement windows this year. He had asked me to remind him in March and again in April to schedule it. His memory turned out to be quite different than mine and between that and the bat in the living room, I wasn’t willing to face another winter of $250-300 a month for 850 square feet of utilities. And now for the irony part. After I found a new place and was packing up, he sent someone over to measure for the windows. Yes, he changed his mind after I decided to move. The windows are in now. For a little bit of additional irony, he re-rented the place quickly, but lost that prospective tenant when he yelled and swore at her over the phone when she asked him if he would paint the interior. He always was a bit of a yeller, something I won’t miss. She asked for her deposit back, and later (also this week after I was out), he repainted the interior. Does this seem crazy to anyone but me?

I’m going to unpack boxes of books today and actually think I may finish. Does one even completely unpack books? If a tree fell in the forest would it make a sound ? How many angels dancing on the head of a pin could be put to better use unpacking my books?

Notes

Mon, 23 Jun 2008 06:20:26 -0500

Since I’m stuck with the moving frenzy, here are some notes to self for later work.

Think about Danae Boyd’s entry in Apophenia about how an attention economy changes everything from a merit economy.
Have my mom save National Enquirers for a poetry exercise for my upcoming honors creative writing/poetry class. The last time I did this exercise, it generated several very good poems, including a memorable one about the Aniston/Pitt wedding. Great images and good predictive value without being cliched.
Java is close to completing an open source conversion (link via Slashdot). How likely was that given the patents and different companies involved? Really cool development, and worth noting in my intro to the Teaching Composition on the Tech Frontlines collection.
Twitter and Plurk comparison. Is Plurk truly the MySpace of microblogging?
I’m currently reading Rebecca Moore Howard’s book, Standing in the Shadows of Giants: Plagiarists, Authors, Collaborators and need to finish before I move and before it needs to go back (inter-library loan, AKA Mobius). I need to not only integrate a reading from it into Teaching Rhetoric and Composition for High School/Jr. College, I also need to think some more about how blogging complicates these issues even more.

And now, back to our program, “Have you used this item in the last three years?” followed by a very special episode of “Know your sponge mop” sponsored by Murphy’s Oil Soap.

The Bat Changes Everything

Wed, 18 Jun 2008 06:39:39 -0500

When I moved to Missouri one of my priorities was to never live in an apartment again. Being a rhetorician, I was even more specific than that; I was to never live in another shared building again. What I found out this month is that a bat changes everything.

I like to use the Ben Franklin close when making major decisions. Once the pros and cons are lined up on paper (or in my case, virtual paper), complex decisions become easier. Here’s the column A lineup:

Charming 1920s brick Tudor with Hobbit-like wooden door, interior archways, and two original brass art deco chandeliers that are really impressive.
An easy walk or bike ride to campus in a bike-friendly neighborhood
Landlord allows cats with non-refundable deposit.
Landlord has committed to replacement windows (needed ).
I really, really hate moving with the deep knowledge that someone who has moved twenty-four times has. That makes staying the default choice over moving unless there are inarguable reasons for moving.

Now here’s column B:

Even though my landlord put on a new roof in May 2007, it wasn’t the best job and it caused massive leaking in the back bedroom. I lost some books over that, and the temporary fix that I watched them do has defaulted into the permanent fix. Dicey.
The water in the ceiling area and walls in the living room and both bedrooms (the MBR has damage from before my move-in) has created mold. The landlord believes that water damage dries out with no further interior damage and thinks my belief that the house is now full of mold inside the walls/ceilings is silly. My inhaler use increasing from none to once or twice a day says otherwise.
Leaky, water-damaged and rotting windows with missing storms and some missing screens.
Winter energy cost high because of the windows--250-300 a month in winter for 850 square feet. The windows were not replaced this spring, and what I thought was a commitment to do so when I renewed the lease seven months in advance (notices go out in January for August renewal), really was a commitment to do so someday.
Basement flooded three times so far this year. That’s not his fault, but it has aggravated the mold level and left me without heat twice and AC once. It also put my washer and dryer in risk of damage each time and kept them out of commission while they dried out.

The depth of how much I hate moving can be measured by the fact that given all the items in column B, I was only going to think about not renewing in January, which would mean finding a new place for August 2009. I hated the idea of one more expensive winter, but also knew the flooding in Missouri this year has made it an expensive year for landlords with multiple properties, thus the delay on the replacement windows. Enter the bat.

I wish I did know how the bat entered the house, but the truth is, there are way too many possibilities for how a bat could get into this house. One of my Sunday School Class members is a former public health nurse, and she told me that the vast majority of human rabies cases in Greene county are caused by bat bites. Just to make it scarier, she noted that people almost never know they’ve been bitten because it happens while they sleep and the bite itself looks much like a mosquito bite. So, short version of the Ben Franklin: theoretical mold--bad, but not provable. Theoretical replacement windows--good, but no timeframe. Real bat in my living room chased out the front door with a floor lamp--surprisingly hard to not think about when trying to sleep at night.

So, my really not-awful landlord is letting me get out of my lease renewal if i want to move at long as I let him know by the 30th. I’m looking at other places now and may end up in a newer duplex, one that lacks all the charm this house has, but has an attached 2-car garage with openers, thermopane windows, and no bat. Research, writing, and other academic work may slow down for a bit while I deal with this.

Teaching Teachers about Open Source and Choice

Tue, 10 Jun 2008 08:08:33 -0500

When we as writing teachers teach writing, does word processor choice make a difference? As a proponent of open source in academia, I believe that not making a choice is a choice also. There is no default word processing choice unless we make it so with unthinking use.

I am teaching English 520: Rhetoric and Composition for High School/ Junior College in the fall. It is overloaded, and is a required class for new and M.A.T.-seeking teachers. I know that the undergrads will be fanning out into a wide spectrum of poor to rich school districts in the spring when they student teach and after graduation in their new jobs as classroom teachers. The M.A.T. students tend to already be employed and are fitting in their graduate work around a full-time teaching load, usually in a high school somewhere within an hour and a half radius. At one end of of the teaching reality for these students is the community colleges, which not only get money from the state, they also get money from their county. This leads to the conundrum of some community colleges in Missouri proportionately having more money to spend on pricey writing and new media classroom than the four-year plan university down the road. K-12 schools understandably vary. As far as I know based on the widely different tech backgrounds of my first-year composition students, where the district is located (rural Ozarks vs. suburban KC or St Louis) can make a huge difference, at times between everyone having access to their own computer to the dusty 486 in the back of the classroom used for DOS-based skill and drill, the virtual version of the dreaded worksheet.

All of this is just background for the issue I am considering with some ethical trepidation: should I make Open Office Writer the word processor of choice for work produced in this class? After all, these are teachers--future or current. Any pedagogical choice for them is fodder for debate, and I do not want to take away from their freedom to choose.

At the same time, I have required Open Office in all my other classes without a qualm, but with the caveat that I didn’t care what program they use to produce their work as long as any assignment that requires files sent to me or files posted to the blog for peer review be .odt files. All the labs on campus have Open Office, so even students who don’t add Open Office to their own computer (or don’t have their own) can easily produce or convert files. Those who post other formats are not penalized, but especially those who post .docx files are in danger of getting reduced feedback from their peers because many cannot open the files on their home computers.

I also model Open Office use. When I show writing actions and examples on the screen (portable cart--I teach for the most part in desk-chairs classrooms), I use Writer for my word processor and Impress for presentations. The result was that they loved the clean, easy interface and most added Open Office to their own computers, if only to be able to open any of the various file formats they might encounter (yes, that includes .docx). It also didn’t hurt that Open Office is free. Given the choice, most chose Open Office over the default/only word processor bundled with their computer. For these students, they chose the computer, not the word processor that came with it. Some students were especially grateful since they had low-end computers with no word processor at all--they were trying to get by with Text Edit. Others simply preferred it over the word processor that came with their computer, and that included Microsoft Office 2007, Word Perfect, and Microsoft Works.

For these students, my requirement added the element of choice where previously there had been no choice. At the end of the semester this spring, I managed to find space in a computer classroom so that the juniors and seniors in my Writing II for Graduate and Professional Schools class could have ample in-class drafting and feedback time for the APA researched paper due at the end of the semester. Although all the labs on campus have Open Office, this was a computer classroom used mainly for statistics classes and It had Microsoft Office 2007 only. They strongly resented not having a choice and those without Vista at home grudgingly made the best of it by saving their files in .rtf.

What it comes down to is that I want my all my students and especially the future teachers among them to “pay attention,” as Cindy Selfe has stressed so many times in her work. We all need to pay attention to technology choices. Not choosing is also a choice. For educators, open source is a far better choice because of its flexibility and the reduced likelihood that OSS will exclude any of our students in the way proprietary software can, either by lack of functionality for task, by overly complex interfaces intended for an enterprise end-user, or, by the most heartbreaking reason for me as a teacher, simply excluding them by cost. I‘m still thinking the details through for this course, but one thing I do know is that thinking about pedagogical choices is important and ignoring it or defaulting to no choice won’t make the issue go away.

Back in the technorati

Mon, 9 Jun 2008 22:46:35 -0500

It was a long and winding road, frustrating to the end, but this blog is finally back on the rolls of the Technorati. Go ahead and favorite me if you wish.

The Return of the Dream

Fri, 6 Jun 2008 17:48:28 -0500

In general, I think I’m decompressed from the semester and have replaced that pressure with writing project pressure instead. Or have I? I had my traditional end of school year nightmare this week. For those of you who never experienced it, it is the dream where it’s finals week and you find yourself being directed to a classroom for a class you forgot you had. My dream traditionally involved a Trigonometry class, and it was taught in Spanish. After last year, I thought I would never have “the dream” again after I pretty much within the dream said, this can’t be real because I have my Ph.D. and a job and promptly woke up. The subconscious is a tricky thing though. The Dream (as many of us in academia refer to it) was not to be so easily defeated, Jungian lucid-dreaming techniques to the contrary.

I now have a new version of the dream. This time I was in the hall, books in hand, and realized as I entered the room that although I knew I was to teach the class, I had forgotten to update the course materials and was literally walking in with no plan, no syllabus, and no clue. In the dream, it was a Intro to Poetry class, which I am teaching an honors section of this fall, but just to make things interesting, three of the students were primarily French speakers and asked pointed questions in French, which I don’t really speak anymore, about villanelles and rondos. Some things never change. I’m surprised that the dream wasn’t for my completely new course prep for this fall, but maybe that course gave my subconscious less to work with.

On a more positive note, I thought one of the things lost with the hard drive was my old Techsophist logo, originally designed by my daughter when she was in high school and had no clue that she would turn into a ceramics/sculpture/art therapy person someday. I tried one more way to search for images in Leopard and found it at last, in all its postmodern fragmented goodness.

I needed the logo because my brief trial with having a Twitter widget on the blog is over. I just don’t think the two venues mesh well--different purposes and different tones. Other than that, I really like Twitter and think of new uses for it all the time. FOr example, I let it give me to-do reminders from Remember the Milk. Now, if only Twitter could get over their stability problems...