stevendkrause.com

My second article/review reading in the December 2010 CCC is Anne-Marie Pedersen’s “Negotiating Cultural Identities through Language:  Academic English in Jordan.”  I should point out at the outset that I haven’t read much of anything on English as a second/non-native/additional language since graduate school, and even then, I didn’t read much.  So the general area of Pedersen’s article is largely something I haven’t studied and am not that interested in.  Not because it’s not important, of course– it is; it’s just something that hasn’t been much an issue for me in my teaching and in my main scholarly focus.

The first thing I thought about in reading this article is this would be a good one to show to grad students in the fall when I teach English 621, which is our sort of research methods/capstone/get ready to work on your MA project class.  Pedersen’s essay is an excellent example of the structure and genre or “research essay” of the sort that a lot of our students do involving subjects:  she introduces the problem, explains her methodology and interview subjects, discusses and concludes (while at the same time drawing on lots of relevant scholarship in the field), and she includes a couple appendixes about her research subjects and questions, notes (including reference to IRB), and a works cited.  Her project involves 24 subjects, which is quite a bit bigger a project than most of MA students should/would tackle, but it looks to me like this work was the basis of Pedersen’s dissertation.

I also like how Pedersen’s project asks a “manageably-sized” question about English use among a set of scholars in the Arabic world (specifically Jordan).  That’s it.  She isn’t trying to find the answer to “life, the universe, and everything,” which is a problem I see frequently with MA students, especially when they start their projects. I tell students you don’t want a project that is like a big shaggy wet dog leaving fur and drool and who knows what everywhere; rather, you want a small and well-groomed lap-dog of a project, the kind of dog/project where the reaction is “aww, that’s adorable.”  So when I say that Pedersen’s project is like a well-groomed lap-dog, I mean that as a compliment.

Ultimately, she finds that her subjects’ relationships with English are complicated.  They rely on English for their scholarship and their teaching, but they value Arabic in their day-to-day lives.  English is the language one of her subjects uses for his phone because he had not bothered to learn how to use Arabic on it; it’s the language another subject uses to communicate with their Philippine (sp??) nanny because she doesn’t speak Arabic, and it’s the language of the TV shows this subject’s kids watch; and it is the language another subject uses to write things that are somehow politically charged.  So on the one hand, English is problematically hegemonic; on the other hand, it is simply the common and accepted language of scientific discourse.

There are only two issues/questions I have about all this.  First, I wonder what the results would be had Pedersen studied language use among scientists or academics in a country that had not had some sort of English colonial history.  I am not sure that English is as necessary or empowering among scholars in places like Russia, France, or Brazil, for example.  Second, she’s talking specifically about science here.  I heard on the radio the other day about a site called Three Percent, the amount (evidently) of the literature written not in English that is ultimately translated into English.  In other words, I can see why it would be critical for scientists participating in an international discourse to know and use English, but I’ll bet you there are plenty of Jordanian and other Arabic poets and fiction writers who are quite successfully practicing their art without English.

Among other things, here are some highlights from the stevendkrause.com blogosphere:

• As the happy academic, I contemplate the profession’s journey to hell in a handbasket. Or not.
• Some miscellaneous thoughts on the iPad while I watch the intro video
• Returning to Gulf Coast Alabama one last time
• Thinking about “Getting Things Done”
• Three things that occur to me today about Lessig’s talk Thursday night (I had forgotten this had received this many comments).
• Krause’s #CCCC10 Recap (A good conference– lots of fun in Louisville).
• The iPad, the first 30 or so hours
• Anybody who says that the iPad is the end of user-generated content or the internet does not know what they are talking about (Possibly my favorite post of the year).
• The iPad as a writerly tool/space
• C&W2010 and the new CCCOnline (I always miss the “interesting” sessions) (To the extent that I have been involved in drama at all this year, this was perhaps it).
• Dexter/AA 5K a success because I beat the fat shirtless old man
• Pacific Coast 2010 (There were a couple of different posts about our trip out west this last summer around this time– good times!)
• Condé Nast and/or WIRED owes me five dollars
• Our midwest casino tour
• Canning/Pickling Experiment, Part 1
• Notes on Grown-Up Camp and the End of Summer (more or less)
• A few thoughts on grading (on the eve of a big push)
• “The Four Hour Work Week” and “The Happy Academic”
• A mini CFP for a roundtable at C&W: Blogs are Dead: Yes, No, Maybe, Other(Which will probably work out to a presentation)
• This blog post is worth 7 points
• My top 10 (ish) iPad apps

At The Unofficial Apple Blog today, I read “The best iOS apps I used in 2010.” It’s a nice enough list, but as an iPad expert (by virtue of the fact that I got one the first day they came out), I thought I’d offer my own thoughts on the top 10-ish apps that I have found myself using in my iPad this year.  Not counting the obvious things like Mail, Safari, iTunes, etc.

• iAnnotate PDF. As far as my academic-life goes, this app probably ranks positions 1 through 8. Hands-down, this is the app I use for work the most, and it is by far the app that gives my iPad its most important “unique” functionality– that is, this is something that I can’t easily do with a desktop or laptop computer.  Basically, iAnnotate allows me to take PDFs of journal articles, book chapters, or whatever else of the sort I put together for course packs for classes I teach and to annotate them as if they were paper by using a stylus or my finger to highlight, take notes, etc.  So, for example, this last fall term, where I taught classes that involved in total about 40 or so readings from books and journals, I made no photocopies and took all of my reading notes right on iAnnotate.  In my mind, if the iPad did nothing beyond what this software does, it’d be worth it.

  If you are not an academic-type, you might be reading this and thinking “big deal,” but if you are someone who teaches college and who hates dealing with all of these paper copies of articles and such, you probably understand.  I was at a function recently and showing my iPad to a colleague who also teaches at EMU and also to her husband, who is a perfectly smart person who exited academia years ago and who now has a “real job.”  He didn’t see the advantage of iAnnotate, but my colleague who taught seemed to immediately to understand the value of this software.

• Facebook.  I know it’s not an iPad app, but I use it a lot, probably more on my iPad than on my iPhone.  I wonder when the Face people are going to come out with an iPad version….
• Reeder for iPad. There are a bunch of different RSS Feed readers for the iPhone and the iPad, but my favorite is Reeder for two basic reasons.  First, it works well with my Google Reader RSS feeds.  Second, it’s very straight-forward and doesn’t have all the unnecessary bells and whistles of readers like the over-hyped Flipboard.
• WeatherBug. This is a link to the “Elite” version, but the free one works fine for me.  Reliable weather information in a nice to read format.
• Twitter. I like the iPad app for this quite a bit, actually– I think much better than for the iPhone.
• Dropbox.  I figured I needed to put this on the list some place, but I don’t actually use this for the iPad so much as iAnnotate uses it:  that is, I upload PDFs to my Dropbox account, and iAnnotate will synch with that to download and then upload again after I annotate the PDFs.  Have I mentioned the pros of iAnnotate yet?
• IMDB. It’s a really slick interface for the ever-popular and useful Internet Movie Database, even if IMDB has gone kind of “commercial.”
• (Tie) Kindle and iBooks.  Since I use my iPad mostly for reading stuff, including both of these apps probably isn’t much of a surprise.  I think that the future of electronic textbooks does not mean Kindle or iBook versions of textbooks, but it rather means free-standing apps presented as books.  Still, I like reading trade and/or “fun” books with both Kindle and iBooks.  In my view, the main advantage of iBooks is it is closer to open source with the epub format, and the main advantage of the Kindle is there are probably 10 times more books available.
• Kayak HD. I don’t use it that much, but the interface for this travel web site is just really slick and user-friendly, more fun to use than it is on a “real computer” for sure.
• (Tie) Pages and Keynote.  As I have noted previously on this blog someplace, both of these applications ought to be followed by the phrase “lite,” as in “not nearly as good as the ‘real’ app for the computer.”  But I have done some writing and presenting with them, so I’ll include them here.

You will notice that I don’t include any games or such things here, mainly because I don’t play a lot of games.  But okay, if I were to include one or two of those, I’d have to say that Angry Birds is pretty fun, and while PS Express isn’t a game but an image editing software, it has a lot of “game-like” features.  As my friend Chris W. once said, Photoshop is the most fun application on the Mac.

We had a later than usual Pepper Nuts session here at the Krause-Wannamaker house today.  We were in Florida for Christmas proper this year, and, because of changes on the Krause side of things at Thanksgiving and less than great planning on our part here before our southern trip, we ended up actually making my family’s classic Christmas cookie after Christmas.  Oh well.

Still, a good time was had by one and all.  Will and Annette definitely did as much as I did this year with the rolling and cutting– good team work, and we all enjoyed remembering relatives from Christmases of the recent and distant past.  Most of this batch will be accompanying us to Iowa in the coming days.  In any event, here’s the annual reprinting/reposting of the recipe, as told to me by my Grandma Krause (and re-written by me):

Grandma Krause’s Pepper Nuts

1 cup dark karo syrup
1/2 cup molasses
1 cup butter, softened (or margarine or crisco or, in the old days, lard)
1 1/2 cups of sugar
1/2 cup hot water
2 tsps baking soda
1/2 tsp baking powder
1 tsp ground cloves
1 tsp cinnamon
1/2 tsp anise oil
1 tsp vanilla
1/4 tsp salt
7 cups (or so) flour

1.In your trusty KitchenAid standing mixer mix together the syrup, molasses, butter, sugar and hot water until well combined. If you lack a standing mixer, you can do this with a large bowl and a hand mixer.

2. Add everything else but the flour and continue mixing until combined.

3. Start adding the flour, about a cup at a time, mixing each time until the flour is well incorporated. If you have a trusty KitchenAid standing mixer, lucky you! You can keep mixing this until all seven cups of flour are combined. I shifted from the regular mixing paddle to the bread hook attachment after the fifth cup of flour.

If you don’t have a standing mixer (unlucky you!), you’ll probably have to give up on the hand mixer after the fourth or fifth cup of flour and knead the rest of the flour in as you might with the making of bread or pizza dough.

Either way, you may have to add a little more or a little less flour to get a dough that is moist but not sticky.

4. Take about a handful of the finished dough and roll it out on a lightly floured surface in long snakes that are about the width of your pinky. Lay these out on a cookie sheet. You can create different layers of the dough snakes by separating them with parchment paper or plastic sheeting.

5. Chill these dough snakes. Grandma Krause’s recipe said to chill “overnight or for at least a couple of hours.” I have done this before by putting them in the freezer or outside in a place like Wisconsin or Michigan or Iowa (which is as cold as the freezer, of course) for an hour or so, though in the movie, I left them out overnight with no adverse effect. They do need to be chilled and even a bit dried out.

6. When ready to bake, preheat the oven to 350-375 degrees. (It kind of depends on your oven, but while Grandma Krause said 350, I think 375 is probably more accurate). Take each snake and cut them into tiny bite-sized pieces of dough. Put the little dough pieces onto a cookie sheet, being sure to spread them out so they don’t touch either. The cookies will expand slightly in size.

7. Bake about 9 or 10 minutes or until golden brown. Cool them on a clean counter or a clean cookie sheet and store them in a sealed container. Serve them in little bowls as if they were nuts. Makes a pailful.

This is a little early for a New Year’s resolution, but I guess now is as good as time as any to share it: I’ve come to the conclusion that I’ve reached the end of the rope of my “Blogs as Writerly Spaces” project. I think I’ve gotten plenty out of it, actually– a sabbatical, a number of good conference presentations, maybe an article or two if I get around to it. But I just have a hard time believing I’m going to get to the next level of a book project out of this. That’s kind of a bummer, but it is what it is.

Anyway, one of the things I decided about all this was that before I even think vaguely about starting another big project, I thought I should spend some time actually reading some scholarship. After all, academics spend all this time producing this stuff, but who actually reads it? I don’t, at least not on a regular basis, not when I’m not trying to write something myself. So this year, my main goal is to do something novel and actually read for the sake of reading and see what I come across. I’ll post some reviews here, hopefully at least one a week.

To kick that off, I thought I’d start with the first essay in the December 2010 CCC, Peter Vandenberg’s and Jennifer Clary-Lemon’s “Advancing by Degree: Placing the MA in Writing Studies.” In brief, it’s an article that historicizes the place of the MA degree in graduate study in general, and then describes several MA programs in Writing, suggesting the importance of local conditions for the role of the MA. It’s nothing earth-shattering, but something that still has to be said.

As an interesting “small world” footnote, one of the people they quote is Marcia Dalbey, who was the department head here at EMU when I started back in 1998. Go figure.

Anyway, Vandenberg and Clary-Lemon wonder why there are so many more students in these “in-between” degree programs, and they lament the way “the MA has functioned in the field’s collective mindset as little more than a Büchner funnel, employed to screen an undesirable element in a process of purification. Yet as the discussion above makes clear, the MA in writing studies for some time has been a flexible, responsive, self-standing enterprise, with intrinsic value rooted in the kinds of knowledge and skill it can produce in local conditions (277).”

I’m not so sure about the scientific/chemical metaphor there, and while I’m also not crazy about sports metaphors, I prefer to think of MA programs as being more like the minor leagues or a farm system, at least in relation to PhD programs. Many students in our MA program– though certainly not all, as I’ll mention in a second– are essentially testing the waters and trying to decide if they want to take the leap into a PhD program. This seems like a really good thing to me. After all, entering PhD studies is a life-changing event, and it is not the sort of thing that people should pursue without careful consideration.

Incidentally, this is at least one reason why there are many more MA students than PhD students. I have had very good MA students here at EMU who had intended to go on to get a PhD, but then when they learned more about what they were getting themselves into– through coursework, through experience as a teaching assistant, from talking to other students and faculty, etc., etc.– they decided getting a PhD was a bad idea. Or they realized they didn’t really have “the chops” to succeed academically and professionally at that level.

In any event, what I’m saying is I think the “filtering” role of MA programs is important for both PhD programs and for students. But I also think that it’s important to point out, as Vandenberg and Clary-Lemon do, that MA programs are as often an ends to themselves. They give several examples/ “case studies” in their article about different MA programs, which I might want to research some more as we consider revising our MA in Written Communication here. Our MA has been around a long time– at least 20 years, maybe more– and it has definitely been changing with the times. Well, at least the students have changed.

We have two emphases in our program: Teaching of Writing and Professional Writing. Back when I came to EMU, I would guess that about 70% or more of the students in the Teaching of Writing strand were practicing secondary school teachers who were coming back to get their MA so they could receive a pay raise and other benefits from their school districts. For all sorts of reasons, those students have largely disappeared from our program. Now the majority of our students focused on Teaching of Writing are interested in teaching in community colleges (a lot of our graduates are full-time or part-time at many area CCs), thinking about secondary school teaching (though it isn’t a certificate program), they’re thinking about the PhD, or they are interested in pursuing a graduate degree generally to see where it takes them. As one of my MA students told me a few years ago, in a job market where “everyone” has an undergraduate degree, a graduate degree– any graduate degree– distinguishes you from other applicants. I don’t know if that’s actually true, but it seems possible to me.

Things have changed in the Professional Writing side of things too. It used to be that a lot of area employers would pay for for their employees to earn graduate degrees, so the Professional Writing emphasis was almost entirely made up of students who had real jobs that could be broadly described as “Professional Writing” and they were attending on the company’s dime. That’s changed a lot in recent years. In fact, with the economy as crappy as it is in Southeast Michigan, we now have many students in our MA in both the Teaching of Writing but especially the Professional Writing program who are attending (in part) to gain professional experience they hope will make them more employable.

These changes (among other things) are causing us now to reconsider the arrangement of our MA program, though that’s something that has taken years, and it will probably take us a few more. My point though is this: we have lots of students who have no intention of going onto a PhD program, and we have always had these students. We have always been an MA program that has mostly attracted students in Southeast Michigan and that has responded to those students’ local plans and needs.

With all the news about delicious going belly-up (or not?), it seems more important than ever for me to park some links here that I want to keep track of:

• From Mashable, a cool map showing Facebook relationships.
• Social media mashups in higher education. I think this is just a bit beyond my technical expertise for Writing for the World Wide Web, but it is something I need to figure out how to do.
• From Lifehacker, the most popular free Apple/Mac software to download of the year. I’ll sort through this at the beginning of 2011.
• Google Labs Books Ngram. This is a pretty remarkable tool for tracing the history of terms for sure.  I haven’t had a lot of time to monkey with this yet, but I can imagine this as pretty darn useful.
• The TOC and a sample chapter from The Four Hour Body by Tim Ferriss. I dunno; I might get it for the kindle so no one can tell what I’m reading….
• From ReadWriteWeb, “How Online Reading Habits Have Changed Over 2010.” It’s interesting, and maybe even something I’ll include for English 444 for the winter.  They mention things like flipboard and some other iPad readers, but the biggest change for me this year in my reading habits has been using iAnnotate on my iPad for the readings I assign.  Really, it’s been a game-changer and if my iPad did little more than this, it’d still be worth it.
• “Turning Blog Posts into a Book Draft,” “pedaboligical” Traci Gardner.  I’ve been thinking a lot in the last couple weeks about scholarly projects– or really, the lack thereof, especially as it relates to my long stalled (and possibly abandoned) “Blogs as Writerly Spaces” research.
• Speaking of which:  “99 Excuses for NOT Making Ideas Happen,” which really ends after 15.  But are still good excuses to, well, get over.
• “How to Export your Delicious Bookmarks and Import Them into your Favorite Browser,” from Lifehaker.  I’m not nearly as devoted to delicious as some of my colleagues, but I do use it a lot.  Since I also now have mobile me, what I should be able to do is transfer my bookmarks to Safari and then synch that across my various devices.  We’ll see.
• “Google Demo Slam,” which is a YouTube video of animations made only with Google Docs.  Very cool.
• “App-etizing:  Cookbooks and Recipes Go Mobile,” which was part of a series of NPR stories last week about apps and books.  Really interesting, and to me, it is clear that publishing is going to some exciting places in the next couple years.  Speaking of which:
• “Start Developing iPad Apps” from Apple and “Beginning iPad Development for iPhone Developers:  Mastering the iPad SDK,” which is one of many books on this.  I really would like to teach myself/learn how to do some of this sort of programming, but I have two basic problems.  First, I don’t do any programming.  Second, I get the impression that first it’s best to learn how to program/develop for the iPhone, which I guess I could do but that doesn’t interest me quite as much.  We’ll see.
• HootSuite.  I’ve just started playing around with this, but it looks like it might be a good option for handling various social networking accounts, which is something I ought to pass along to my English 444 students.
• “Google Maps & Label Readability,” from 41 Latitude, which looks to be a blog mostly about maps.  I haven’t taught a visual rhetoric class (yet), but one thing I think I would do if I were to teach such a class is to frame the whole thing around maps, which I have always found to be quite fascinating.  Anyway, this is an interesting (albeit geeky) analysis as to why Google Maps are the bomb.
• Two Jakob Nielsen Alertbox posts that might be useful for the directions I’m taking in English 444 this winter:  “College Students on the Web,” and “Writing for Social Media.”

Not necessarily in this order:

• If the mainstream media did its freakin’ job, Wikileaks would be irrelevant.  The only reason this is much of a story at all is because MSM, too lazy and/or too afraid of and/or owned by “the man” to actually dig around and investigate and look for whistle-blowers on its own, is perfectly happy to have Wikileaks do their homework for them.  MSM isn’t in trouble because of the internets or whatever; they’re in trouble because they can’t do as good of a job of telling people what’s going on as a bunch of half-baked computer hackers.
• I haven’t read anything on Wikileaks lately, but I have yet to hear a “leak” that that was something that is really too surprising.  Various cables about various world leaders might be embarrassing, but I think we already knew that the people running North Korea are nuts, the people running Afghanistan are corrupt, and even that a lot of the other countries in the Middle East would be kind of okay with the U.S. putting a beat-down on Iran.  Now, if Wikileaks uncovered something like  911 being an “inside job” or how the U.S. has been secretly supporting North Korea (just to keep tensions high) or about our contact with aliens at Area 51 or whatever– if any of that happens, then we’re talking.
• I’m generally for the idea of Wikileaks, but it’s hard for me to get too far behind it in part because Julian Assange seems like a real piece of work.  Even before the rape/sexual assault charges in Sweden, he seemed kind of… I don’t know, smarmy to me.  He seems sort of like a more liberal/libertarian version of Matt Drudge, and I don’t mean that as a compliment.
• Derek and I were talking the other day about how Ratemyprofessor.com and wikileaks seem to be kind of similar– reckless, based mostly on rumor and unsubstantiated reports, mixed with a twist of “the truth.”

I had a conversation with a student the other day that continues to bother me.  I think for what are obvious reasons, I am not going to go into specific detail, but in summary, this person was unhappy with the earned grade on a project.  Very unhappy. So I of course scheduled a meeting with this person, assuming/hoping we were going to mostly discuss strategies for a revision.  Instead, this student essentially yelled at me.  I was told the assignment was not clear and that the student (in this person’s opinion, of course) had indeed fulfilled the assignment, regardless of my judgment and grade.

Furthermore, I as admonished for not being able to describe how many points certain portions of the assignment were worth and for not having (what this student had in mind as) a clear grading rubric.  How, this student wondered aloud and angrily, how could I possibly hope to teach anything absent a rubric that clearly describes what parts of the assignment are worth what points?

A few thoughts:

• This student was not without a point– that is, this person did suggest valid ways in which the assignment description was lacking.  My main problem is that this assignment is relatively new and some of the problems I am experiencing this term– this is not the only student who missed part of the point of the project– were things I had not anticipated and which were not a problem previously.  I know, kind of vague.  Let’s just say I will have to add some language to the project that I thought was somewhat obvious, but you know what they say when you assume. Of course, there was a vigorous discussion on the class site (it’s an online class) about what exactly the assignment was about and I gave numerous examples of possibilities, and there was nothing to stop this student from asking for clarification or from running an idea past me.  Students– particularly college students, particularly college students who are juniors and seniors– have a certain obligation and responsibility to ask questions about assignments they are unclear about.  But that is perhaps beside the point.
• Another point this student had that I think is valid and that I see all the time is a discrepancy between peer review comments and my comments– in other words, in the peer review process, students say the draft is great, but my comments and grade disagree with that.  This is because too often student comments are not detailed and not constructively critical (e.g. “Great job!  I learned a lot from your essay!  This is perfect in every way!”), and this is generally because students often don’t spend enough time in peer review, and/or also because students are way WAY too nice to each other, even in comparably anonymous online environments.  I think I need to do more to get students to question these overly rosy comments (Derek had some good points about this, btw), but I am completely convinced that the main reason students are not as constructively critical as they could be is because they don’t want to offend anyone or make anyone sad.  I think that if the peer review process was anonymous, then students would give more critical advice.  But that’s an experiment/change for next term.
• Several years ago, a student who came into my office itchin’ for an argument from me would have gotten it.  Just a few years ago, a student coming into my office to bully me into changing a grade (and I am not accusing this student of that–not exactly– and I am quite sure this student has a very different interpretation of things) probably would have been successful simply because I would have decided it was not worth it.  Nowadays, when students come into my office and yell at me (not that this happens that often), I realize that the problem here is probably not mine.
• What I object to most is the appeal to grading rubrics and points, a strategy I have quite frankly seen from a number of students who are studying to be K-12 teachers who have had just enough exposure to an undergraduate methods course to be vaguely familiar with the terms “rubric” and “assessment.”  As I told this student the other day, the use of rubrics is complex and debatable, the assignment and peer review process constitute a “rubric” of sorts,  and I would be happy to debate the use of rubrics in writing courses– particularly formal rubrics, and particularly in advanced writing courses– with any one of my colleagues in Education and/or assessment.  The same goes for points.  Assigning points (or percentages, of course) to projects or parts of projects in a class focused on something as leaky, fluid and non-discrete as the writing class is a convenient fiction at best.  Or at least they are convenient fictions when the points/rubrics are not forced upon educators from some sort of outside assessment force.  The kinds of institutional/external assessments that happen in higher education (accreditation, for example) and the sort of fetishized testing and rubrics and assessments forced upon folks in elementary and secondary education are  entirely different kind of convenient fictions.
• On the other hand, it never ceases to amaze me how magically powerful assigned points and rubrics and the like are.  If I had only accompanied my grade and comments on the final project with a chart listing discreet elements worth a certain number of points, no matter how “made up” and dubious that chart might be, I am quite sure I would not have had the unpleasant conversation I had today.  After all, how could rubrics and points possibly lie?
• I do have a simple point system that helps me keep track of grades and that helps students to see where they’re at in a course.  The class as a whole is worth 1000 points, participation is worth 200 points, each major project is worth 150 points, etc.  The number doesn’t matter, of course because fundamentally, it’s just a percentage system, and in my view, what really matters is the dialog I usually have with students about their grades, about revising, about improvement, etc..  I have literally taught courses in the past worth 1,000,000 points, and if I were better with numbers, I’d teach a course worth one point.  The points don’t matter because the process (and the percentages, for that matter) doesn’t change.
• And yet, the power of the point in even my simplistic system is indisputable.  I have conversations with students who are seven points away from a “B” for the term, and when I say to a student in a conference “see, the problem is you are seven points short, so there’s really nothing I can do here, you’re going to get a ‘C+,’” that student inevitably nods and says “yeah, I see you’re point.”  Never once have I had a student stop to think a moment and speak the truth to me:  “Yeah, but you can pretty much give me whatever grade you think you can justify, right?”

Annette and Will and I had a Thanksgiving of just the three of us and at home for the first time in…. heck, I think the first time ever.  There was one year quite a while ago where I recall Annette’s parents coming to visit us, but otherwise, it has been a 10-12 hour drive to Iowa to see my family or a 12-14 drive to see Annette’s family in South Carolina.  That’s a lot of time to spend in a car in the span of four or five days under any circumstances, but since Thanksgiving comes at what is often the worst possible crunch point of the semester, it is even worse.  Not to mention all the other drivers, the often dicey weather, etc.

Anyway, for circumstances I won’t go into (mainly because they aren’t that interesting or dramatic), what would have been a Krause get-together this year was changed to a New Year’s Christmas, and we were able to spend the time at home.  And I gotta say:  I love my family– both my side and Annette’s side– dearly, but the luxury of having a (relatively) small Thanksgiving at home was excellent. Among other things, I worked on an overdue movie project, I graded lots of things (almost done with that), we did almost all the laundry in the house, we cleaned, ran errands, winterized the backyard a bit more, and slept in.  We watched a lot of different movies, from Planes, Trains, and Automobiles to a couple of 1940s Tarzan flicks to Doctor Who, we had a lovely dinner with friends tonight, we watched football (dang Lions, dang Hawkeyes), we worked out at the gym.

And, of course, we ate and cooked.  I can’t remember the last time I cooked a turkey– probably the last time that we had Thanksgiving at home years ago.

It turned out okay.  My timing was off, so I think I ended up overcooking it a bit, and while I did a brine for about 36 or so hours, I’m not convinced that on this size of bird it was actually worth it.  And I’m not all that crazy about turkey anyway.  Maybe next year, if we’re home again like this (I hope we’re home again like this), I’ll make a Thanksgiving chicken, or maybe Thanksgiving lasagna.

I also attempted a fancy version of green bean casserole by using a really excellent homemade mushroom soup (a Thomas Keller recipe), adding cream to that, and then adding fresh green beans and topping it all with homemade fried onions.  That was a fail, I’m afraid.  The lesson learned here is sometimes the simple things are best, like the humble version with cream of mushroom soup, frozen green beans, and canned fried onions.  Like canned cranberries.

I’ll post sooner than later (yet this weekend, certainly) about Thanksgiving at home this year, but in the meantime, it’s time once again to post a ton of links to stuff open in my browser that I want to and/or need to come back to sooner than later.  In no particular order here:

• “The Nookcolor and the Future of Textbooks,” and “The Evolution of the Digital Coursepack,” both blog entries on Inside Higher Ed from Joshua Kim.  I agree with the point he’s trying to make here and to me, digital textbooks/coursepacks in the form of things like Nooks, Kindles, iPads, etc. are a no-brainer.  But whenever I bring this up with my students– first year students and grad students– they give me feedback that suggests that the teachers are a lot more ready for this stuff than the students, I guess because students are thinking about the costs, about how they will be able to highlight and/or otherwise take notes, and how much they’ll get for selling it back.
• “38 Ways to Write about Writing,” from way back in mid-October from Traci Gardner.  A nice list of stuff.  Speaking of which, there’s “Five Ways to Write Magnificent Copy.”
• From guardian.co.uk, “Class blogs:  A better way to teach?” Why, yes, yes they are.  This is actually more about elementary/middle school settings, so kind of cool.
• “A Model for Open Textbook Sustainability,” which is about just that.  I’m quoted in here, so I guess that makes it something worth linking to…..
• From Lifehacker, “AppMakr Helps You Create Your Own iPhone App for Free, No Coding Necessary.” Learning how to do some coding for the iPhone/iPad is one of those “maybe someday” sort of things for me, so I want to keep track of this.
• From guardian.co.uk “A renaissance rooted in technology:  the literary magazine returns,” which is about how there’s a whole new series of literary periodicals emerging online.  Maybe useful for Writing for the World Wide Web.
• DEVONthink is apparently the organizational software that Steve Johnson favors.  I dunno, but I think what I need is a motivational/stay disciplined software and/or medication.
• “How Handwriting Trains the Brain” from WSJ.com. I actually bought a book/notebook on practicing handwriting, thinking it is something Will and I could do together.  I still haven’t gotten around to it though, and now I’m not sure where that book/notebook is.
• “Smarthistory: a multimedia web-book about art and art history” is a super-cool web site/”textbook” of the sort you’d use in a gen-ed art history course or something.  Lots of neat stuff here, and an interesting model for folks in other disciplines (writing, perhaps?) to imitate.
• Monster Tire Video, Detroit, MI. I didn’t realize this that that big tire was a Ferris wheel at the World’s Fair.
• “Change Up Your Digital Writing.” Karl Stoley has had a couple of great blog posts/links to things lately; here’s one of them, something I will almost certainly include in 444 this winter.  And here’s another post about HTML 5 from Karl.
• “Copying Right and Copying Wrong with Web 2.0 Tools in the Teacher Education and Communication Classrooms.” I haven’t read this yet, but it looks potentially useful for 444 and 516, not to mention some of the courses taught by my colleagues in English Education.
• “Facebook Comprises Nearly 25% of Page Views in the US,” at least that was what was reported here on Read Write Web.  I find that to be a somewhat disturbing statistic, actually.
• “iBendXL– The Thinnest Stand for the iPad” from PadGadget. I dunno, but this looks like something you could make yourself with a piece of posterboard.  Maybe a project for later.