it was many years ago today
Mike's not the only one. Today is my birthday, too. L and I had brunch at The Cup and Saucer, and we'll have dinner at an undisclosed (to me) location.
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Mike's not the only one. Today is my birthday, too. L and I had brunch at The Cup and Saucer, and we'll have dinner at an undisclosed (to me) location.
...to make the cover of Wired magazine?
I've subscribed for a few years now, and when the current issue came, L saw the cover and pointed out that the only women we've seen on the cover in the past several issues haven't exactly been known for their accomplishments in the fields of technology:
You have to go all the way back to 1996 to find a cover story on Sherry Turkle, and before that to 1994 for one on Laurie Anderson. Other than these two cover stories, there are none on women in technology.
See for youself. Check out the Wired archive of covers. Pretty shameful, no?
It's not like there aren't enough candidates. (Thanks to Caterina Fake on misbehaving.net for the link.)
A couple of KC blogs feature photographs of the results of today's (and tonight's) snowfall. Nothing as dramatic as what fell on Washington, D.C. and other parts east, I'm sure. This view is close to where I live. I don't know where this is. I did a quick browse through the blogs listed at KC Bloggers but did not find more. Perhaps Heidi will post some pix, too.
Update: Yup. There they are.
Slice o' life. Free WiFi at Muddy's Coffeehouse, next to campus. Reading Samuel Johnson for my course on eighteenth-century lit. Classic rock on the shop's satellite radio: the Doors, Heart, Tom Petty, 38 Special, Fleetwood Mac, Steve Miller Band. Members of the KCMO Police Department Tactical Response Team come in for some java, playing air guitar. Light snow falling outside.
Palimpsest: "Open source teaching resources. Good stuff, free."
It's alive!
The British Library has made available online the Crace Collection of Maps of London, "the essential guide to the development of the capital from the 16th to the 19th centuries, brought together by the Victorian designer, Frederick Crace." This exhibit is part of a BL site entitled Collect Britain, "the British Library's largest digitisation project to date ... By summer 2004 you can view and hear a staggering 100,000 images and sounds from our world-renowned collections without ever needing to visit the prestigious building in London." (via Andrew Pink on C18-L)
"Reading is a fundamentally solitary activity, which is why readers seek other readers, trying to create a sense that they are participating in a shared activity. In the last year or so, literary bloggers have begun to take the place of the little magazines and have subtly tilted the entire critical climate."
-David Sexton, writing in the Scotsman (via Beatrice)
In case the link to Sexton doesn't last, here are the sites he mentions: Good Reports, MobyLives, BookSlut, Moorish Girl, Maud Newton, Old Hag, The Minor Fall, The Major Lift, and The Elegant Variation.
Sexton also mentions "[m]ore formal and respectable reviews" such as Hyde Park Review, the Literary Saloon, Waterboro Library, Arts and Letters Daily, Kitabkhana, and La MuseLivre.
The nominations came fast and furious. Delegates traveled from far and wide to take part in a process to determine the future of online, collaborative creation and sharing of teaching resources. Gathered in a smoke-filled room tucked away in an obscure midwestern town, they debated into the wee hours. Sure, all the candidates had their strengths, but which would prove most likely to go the distance, to hold up to the unforeseen challenges of the future?
In the end, one candidate was the obvious choice.
palimpsest: open source teaching resources. good stuff, free.
The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines palimpsest as follows:
The delegates believed that the site might not always be a blog, or might eventually develop areas that are not blog-based, so any name playing on the word "blog" was elimated.
They also leaned toward a single word name, easy to remember. Some thought a few of the candidates were too cute, and that they would not reflect the seriousness of the project. Others thought these names were fine, but in the interest of party unity, they were willing to compromise.
The nature of the project - one significant aspect of which is that documents are submitted, and then rewritten by a variety of participants - seemed to be best captured by "palimpsest."
Finally, the pithy description provided by one of the unsuccessful candidates has been attached to the winning name.
It was decided that both eriC and Scott should receive the promised music-mix CD, and so it is requested that they send their mailing addresses to ghw at wordherders dot net.
Many thanks to everyone for their suggestions. It is the participation of blogosphere citizens like you that makes democracy possible. *sniff*
It saddens me to do so, but I'm taking a break from the guitar lessons I started back in September. I intend to keep playing, but the lessons have become one more responsibility for me to worry about. And the original idea for all of this was, in part, that I needed an escape from responsibilities. Lately I've been avoiding practice because I wasn't getting any better at trying to learn "The Wind Cries Mary," for example. And then I'd feel guilty about coming to the lesson not having improved since the previous week. Not fun.
So after talking it over with my instructor, we agreed that I should take some time off from the lessons for a little while until I get back to feeling comfortable about playing. I need to find my focus, rediscover what it is I want to achieve as an amateur musician, and determine how this outlet for creativity fits in with the rest of my life. Obviously these are significant tasks.
The group blog on creating and sharing teaching resources needs a name. I am hereby announcing a contest in which the winner, chosen through a complicated caucus-based process, will be sent a compact disc music mix created by me, featuring fantastic tracks by artists you've never heard of. The intended audience of and participants in the blog are those who teach in English departments, although their areas of specialization within that discipline are open.
Teaching. The discipline of English. The open-source philosophy. Keep these things in mind, dear reader, as you vie with countless competitors for the international honor that winning this contest will bring you.
Award-winning local poets Michelle Boisseau and Denise Low will read from their work on January 20 at 7:00 p.m. at the Johnson County Central Resource Library as part of the ”Writers Place Poetry Reading Series”. 9875 W. 87th St. in Overland Park. Call 913-495-2472 or 816-753-1090 for more information.
This blog looks interesting: Typographica, a journal of typography. As someone who obsesses about the appearance of every document I create, and who salivates over a nice-looking page, I am pleased to have found this site. And Typographica points us to Typographer, Coudal Partners, Daidala, Keith Tam, and Speak Up.
Via WaPo: The Library of Congress, as part of their amazing American Memory site, has launched "Voices from the Days of Slavery: Former Slaves Tell Their Stories."
Friggin' fire alarm. Again. At least this time it was turned off sooner. It could be half as loud and it would still fulfill its purpose.
You know what else was loud, back in the day? Hüsker Dü.
I remember watching the Joan Rivers Show when Hüsker Dü was on. They were promoting their just-released double album Warehouse: Songs & Stories.
Joan said something like, "I've been doing my homework. And I know that you guys don't write the same angry songs you used to." Bob Mould responded, "Yeah, well, we're not seventeen anymore."
All this by way of telling you that Bob Mould has a blog, now. (Thanks, Geoffrey.)
I was poking around the paratexts of someone's blog when I clicked on their Amazon.com wishlist and immediately noticed that this person has musical tastes similar to mine. I thought, "Hmm. Wouldn't it be a bad idea for bloggers to publicize their Amazon.com wishlists and list a few CDs they'd like to have, hoping that some reader might contact them and offer to burn them a copy of one of those CDs? Perhaps it would also be a bad idea if that reader were to send the blogger a link to their Amazon.com wishlist to see if the blogger would offer to burn a copy of one of those CDs."
So whatever you do, do not look at my Amazon.com wishlist to see which CDs I would like to have. And do not email me at ghw[at]wordherders[dot]net to offer to burn me a copy of one of those CDs that you might own in exchange for my burning you a copy of one of my CDs that you might like.
It would just be wrong.
Update: So where did all these musicians come from? They've always been there, but because of the way the music industry works, most of us don't get to hear them. I like popular music well enough, but I also try to find music that's out of the mainstream. I get recommendations (and gifts) from friends, listen to non-commercial radio stations via the Internet, check out tracks from Epitonic, read and check out tracks from Pitchforkmedia, look up information on Allmusic, which has a nice "similar artists" function. You can also learn a lot by reading blogs, ya know. Here, let me point you towards this Allmusic entry on a genre of music known as post-rock.
Liz Lawley reports getting hammered with comment spam on her blog tonight. If you're running your blog on MT, you need to have MT Blacklist. It's easy to install, and it works like a charm. I've just updated the Wordherders' blacklist, which I'll link to here.
How hard should it be to figure out how to transfer MP3s from your Apple Powerbook to your non-iPod MP3 player? Apple has a reputation for intuitive user interfaces, and yet I cannot for the life of me determine how to get the songs off of the hard drive onto this Rio Cali. The computer recognizes the player, and it's listed in the "Source List" in iTunes. And yet... how do you get this stuff over here onto that thing over there?
Does anyone know?
Update: This does not help. The songs will not drag and drop.
I agree with Mike that we should just start with a blog, "since that's the method all parties seem familiar with." If you would like to participate in a group blog on sharing teaching resources and creating resources collaboratively, email me at ghw[at]wordherders[dot]net with a username and password. I'll add you to the list of authors on a blog I've set up.
[In case you're just joining us, dear reader, here are my first post and second post on the subject.]
Via Many-to-Many: "Using Wikis for content management...." Here, Tom Coates addresses what has been one of my reservations about wikis, the somewhat awkward resulting appearance and navigational elements: "the particularly networked rather than heirarchical model of navigation that they lend themselves towards isn't suitable for all kinds of public-facing sites (the same could be said of the one-size-fits-all design of the pages)." Coates asks us to
imagine for a moment that the Wiki page itself is nothing but a content management interface and that the Wiki has a separate templating and publishing engine that grabs what you've written on the page, turns it into a nicely designed fully-functioning (uneditable) web-page and publishes it to the world. It could make the creation of small information rich sites enormously quick - particularly if you built in FTP stuff.
Indeed. Make it so.
On the subject of sharing content: check out the OpenCourseWare project at MIT, and specifically the Literature section.
William C. Dowling, an English professor at Rutgers University, provides a nice handout for undergraduates on how (and why) to use the Oxford English Dictionary.
Via Slashdot: "How to Deconstruct Almost Anything--My Postmodern Adventure."
You know you're in trouble when even nerds feel safe beating up on you.
Update: More interesting than Morningstar's piece, to me, is the discussion on Slashdot, linked above. It provides an idea of what a certain class of non-insiders has to say about literary studies. The discussion is not, in my opinion, very well informed.
And check out this response from Steve Ramsay, a professor of English at the University of Georgia who specializes in humanities computing. He started a Slashdot thread back in August of 2002 on peer review in humanities computing. Many of the resonses to that post indicate readers did not really understand what he was getting at, taking the opportunity instead as an excuse to bash the humanities in general.
Via Kairosnews: First, "Open source content in education: Developing, sharing, expanding resources", by George Siemens. And second, "Not-so-Modest Proposals: What do we want our system of scholarly communication to look like in 2010?", by John Unsworth.
Noting similarities to the project I proposed, Dennis G. Jerz draws our attention to the Commontext Library:
Commontext is a completely new concept: a publisher of freely shared classroom texts. Its goal is to allow unrestricted, free access to a vast collection of learning materials produced at the highest level of excellence, including academic peer review and fact checking, and professional editing and proofreading.
Read the FAQ, which states that "'beta' phase" materials were to be available in Fall 2003, with "[f]inal, professional-quality course materials" available in Fall 2004. On first blush, however, there doesn't seem to be much content available. I also don't find the site very intuitive to navigate. Put yourself in the shoes of a non-expert web user: how easy would it be to find the information you're looking for?
It appears that the site runs on Drupal, "an open-source platform and content management system for building dynamic web sites."
How is Commontext different from what I'm proposing? Well, I don't really know, but I would return to these questions:
The answers to these questions would be a good starting point for this project. A user-friendly website that would allow users to act in response to these questions easily is what I'm imagining.
A couple of distinctions might be helpful here. On the one hand, I'm imagining contributors might share things like handouts, assignments, exercises, and syllabi. Feedback and refinement would ideally make these materials better. But on the other hand, contributors could also collaborate on building web-based resources like the ones that were mentioned before (e.g. Guide to Grammar and Style, Glossary of Literary and Rhetorical Terms, Guide to Literary and Critical Theory). In addition, discussions of how to use these materials would be useful. A site that facilitates all of these things is what I'm thinking of.
Five years ago when a few savvy instructors rushed to integrate the Web into their teaching and put their syllabi online the idea exchange so crucial to academia was alive and well in the teaching realm of our work. A few years later, witness how various password-protected courseware adopted by so many campuses is making it increasingly impossible to see others’ teaching materials. Sure, some people may not want to share their syllabi, but I suspect many wouldn’t mind. Regardless, the increasing proliferation of these services makes the teaching side of our work less and less visible to a wider audience.
Eszter Hargittai, "The un(?)intended consequences of courseware"The basic idea behind open source is very simple: When programmers can read, redistribute, and modify the source code for a piece of software, the software evolves. People improve it, people adapt it, people fix bugs. And this can happen at a speed that, if one is used to the slow pace of conventional software development, seems astonishing.
In terms of web resources, what do those who teach courses in English need that a committed group of bloggers might create? I'm not talking about software, mind you, but I'm agreeing with the assumption that the open source philosophy can be successfully applied to all kinds of projects. We're all going to be coming up with course materials anyway. Why not collaborate or at least share?
Jack Lynch, who doesn't have a blog but should, has an impressive Guide to Grammar and Style that might prove useful as well as an unfinished Glossary of Literary and Rhetorical Terms. I have a brief guide to the mechanics of quoting, paraphrasing, and summarizing in MLA style. Of course, materials like these are widely available in print, but when so many of us are creating websites for our courses, it is more than a little convenient to be able to link directly directly to information that students will find helpful.
Would it make sense to create a group blog devoted to teaching English language and literature, one where ideas could be exchanged, resources shared, pointers to already existing sites posted, websites collaboratively created?
Consider these questions:
- What have you created that you'd like to share with others?
- What have you found on the web that has been most useful in your teaching?
- What have you not found that you wish were out there? What's on your wish list?
Can we work to make these things available without taking an inordinate amount of time out of our already busy schedules?
Update 1: And if you think this is a good idea, please mention this post in your blog to increase the chances that potentially interested parties, who may or may not read my blog, find out about it.
Update 2: Okay, possibilities for format include a database (like DISC: A Disability Studies Academic Community, using MySQL) a blog (like the many group authored blogs out there using MovableType), a Wiki (like the Wikipedia), or some combination of such things.
Because there are only so many scales you can learn, my guitar instructor is now teaching me the Jimi Hendrix song "The Wind Cries Mary." I'm not a huge Hendrix fan, but he is, so...
It's an interesting experience (no pun intended) to get inside someone else's head to see how they created something. The opening of the song, which you may or may not be familiar with but can get for 99 cents on iTunes, features a smooth three-chord phrase repeated twice in two slightly different ways. It sounds really cool, but your hands do something fairly simple. Throughout this very melodic piece, Hendrix's musicianship is impressive. It's not a showcase for flashy virtuosity, but instead demonstrates his ability to phrase and rephrase things up and down the guitar's fretboard with an elegant economy of expression.
I was thinking about this, believe it or not, as I was working on implementing Liz Lawley's MT Courseware, her adaptation of MovableType for teaching purposes. What Liz has done is really ingenious, but also impressive because of its simplicity. In particular, the graceful way she pulls off the menu of tabs along the top of the content of each page using a stylesheet and some MT template tags just blew me away. Liz writes that she learned how to do this from A List Apart, which features a similar navigation scheme, but I believe the the bit of code using MT template tags that made it work with her particular application is all her own.
I'm sure Hendrix picked things up from other guitarists, too, and then added the bits that made his music his own. That's how we learn, isn't it? Imitation followed by innovation. I've learned a few things from using Liz's templates that I plan to use in my own blog.
Oh, and it appears I've pulled it off. The MT Courseware, that is. I'm still working on the song.
I never get sick. I can count on one had the number of times I've been sick in the last ten years. I'm like Bruce Willis in Unbreakable, only my invulnerability is focused on an unusually strong resistance to illness.
And yet, here I am in bed with a head full of gunk, spacy on cold medicine, trying to get my semester-prep work done along with other responsibilities.
Ugh.
My classes start on the 13th. I'm updating one syllabus and writing another one from scratch.
I have tweaked my explanation of the rules (PDF) for "Ivanhoe: a game of critical interpretation," an unconventional assignment that I blogged about earlier. I'll be having my students play Ivanhoe in my Spring section of Introduction to British Literature, 1
If you were a student, would this make sense to you? What might seem unclear? What questions would you have?
Admiring the new color scheme over at WeezBlog and working on setting up course blogs for next semester (with frequent stupid questions sent Liz Lawley's way), I'm remembering that back in the days of the browser-safe color palette, Lynda Weinman had a book called Coloring Web Graphics that included page after glossy page of sample website designs with color codes for the creatively lazy. If you liked a particular design, it was easy to just adopt the colors for your own purposes.
Does anything like that exist out on the web? (He asked without bothering to google first.)
...because a late night of karaoke meant I spent today in low-watt mode. But I've been working on getting Liz Lawley's MT Courseware set-up to work on my teaching installation of MT. Still have kinks to work out (I'm pretty sure the kinks are on my end, somehow), and coding/tagging always seems to keep me up later than I intend.
Earlier, I made some good progress on revising syllabi for the upcoming semester, including refining my use of the game Ivanhoe, something I wrote about earlier.
We were also fortunate enough today to catch the Marsden Hartley (images via google) exhibit at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art. I had seen his painting entitled "Christ Held by Half-Naked Men" (1940-1941) at the Hirshhorn in D.C., but I was unfamiliar with his larger body of work, which is quite varied.
Finally, I continued to tweak this blog's layout. Thanks to Jason for reminding me to check out the CSS provided by Blue Robot and to Eric Sigler for the pointer to MTSimpleComments. There are still kinks, but I'm just too pooped right now to figure them all out.
Obviously I'm still trying some things with the style sheet. Bear with me.
I switched back to a 2-column layout. If you are experiencing any weirdness in how it displays (e.g. on Mac's), please let me know. Include your OS version and your browser version. Thanks!
Update: Other things I'm trying to achieve include changing "recent comments" on the main page to "recent comments and trackbacks" (any tips on how to do that?), using the "categories" function, and using a drop-down for the categories and archive months. Yes, I'm just stealing features from some of my favorite blogs. Oh, I'd also like to enable limited HTML in the comments, but I'm unsure how to do that. I know I could read around on the web and figure it out for myself, but I'll start with the lazy approach: can anyone point me in the right direction?
There's a dark and a troubled side of life
There's a bright and a sunny side too
Though we meet with the darkness and strife
The sunny side we also may view
Liz argues for the positive effects of "actively listing and talking about the good things in ... life." Right on. Here's what I'm grateful for:
Most of all I'm grateful for eleven and a half years of life with L, without whom none of the above would matter.
Ugh. Someone burned some toast, and now the apartment building's fire alarm has gone off. It is ear-splittingly loud. My ears haven't vibrated this much since I saw Neil Young in 1983 on his Trans tour. (And doesn't that album sound a lot more interesting now than it did twenty years ago?)
For the love of God! Make it stop! I have black-eyed peas and greens to eat!
Update: Well, it only took forty-five minutes, but the alarm is finally off.