The Salt-Box

Some of you will have seen this already, but Tom Franklin is administering a survey about the use of web 2.0 in teaching [“we” in the paragraphs below = Tom Franklin]:

We are undertaking an international study of the use of Web 2.0 technologies in teaching, learning, support and administration.  As part of this study we are collecting evidence, in the form of case studies, of the use of Web 2.0 in higher education in the United Kingdom, Australia, The United States of America, South Africa and the Netherlands.

If you have been using Web 2.0 in your practice we would be very grateful if you would complete the survey, which can be found at

http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=MZjfSlt_2buoldTLQM0ZxB1A_3d_3d 

or http://tinyurl.com/65ub2s .

Completing the survey should take around 20 – 30 minutes, and if you leave your email address we will send you the draft report for comment and the final report.

I found this at Tame the Web (via my CIO).

At Cult of Mac yesterday, Leander Kahney wrote about a new Japan-only feature of the iPhone 3G:

The iPhone 3G in Japan has a special feature unique to that country: The camera always makes a conspicuous “shutter” sound when a picture is taken, even when the phone is set to “silent” mode.

The loud shutter sound is supposed to deter voyeurs from taking sneaky pictures up women’s’ skirts — or down their tops.

Don’t have anything particular to add here, other than the fact that it allows me to combine the iPhone and one of my favorite first-day-of-class etiquette stories: I have a colleague from elsewhere who had an upskirt photo taken of her while teaching.  She wasn’t dressed provocatively–just crouched awkwardly while fiddling with a multimedia workstation.  In that situation, the loud shutter noise wouldn’t have made any difference: The student in question was so self-impressed that he was cackling and showing it off to his friends.  (Which led to her confronting him, which led to other consequences.)

That’s probably the difference between “smart-ass student” and “committed upskirt voyeur”: stealth mode.

A week or so ago I bought a Flip video camera–after an amusing exchange at Best Buy in which a sales associate claimed never to have heard of this trendy popular camera despite standing in front of a display of ’em–for a Secret Video Project.

It turns out that it is *exactly* as easy to use as advertised, and so I’ve already shot more video in the past week than I did in the previous 3 or 4 years combined.  (We shot a little during the kid’s first year.)

I promise not to turn this into a blog for home movies, but conveniently the 5-yr-old picked up some new tricks–all this week!–that I can show off.

More details will follow soon, but it looks like A & I will be taking classes to London during the 2009 Winter Session.  There’ll be 200- (suitable for nonmajors) and 400-level courses on American modernist expats, and a 400-level class on Victorian/Modernist London.

It looks like we’ll be spending ~9 days abroad, so we should be able to do a lot.

What you can do now:

• Pray for the dollar to rebound!
• Let one of us know if you’d be interested in going.
• Watch this space for more details.  I’ll be setting up a page on the wiki, too.

Earlier this summer, I wrote up a short paper based on my wikified class notes assignment, and sent it off to WikiSym 2008 as a research paper proposal.  This was, in retrospect, overly ambitious: The “research paper” section really is for people working on theoretical or empirical approaches, or on developing new systems, and my paper was really just a version of, “hey, here’s an interesting way you can use wikis in a lit class!”  So, the paper was rejected.

I will say, though, that it was rejected in a really classy and useful way.  Mark Bernstein, from Eastgate, is program chair for WikiSym 2008, and he’s developed a full series of guidelines for how to vet conference proposals.  You can read it here.  Rather than just a flat rejection, I got comments from 4 or 5 members of the program committee, explaining *exactly* why it was rejected.  (In part, it was the fit issue described above; others pointed out, correctly, that as yet there’s not a mechanism for comparing its effectiveness to other approaches.  One or two also pointed me to useful references in other disciplines.)  What that actually left me with was a clear revision plan for sending the paper out to a different venue (e.g., one orientated toward teaching, especially English) for publication.  It was certainly the most productive rejection I’ve ever received.

But the coolest bit happened next, when Bernstein e-mailed me a day or two after the rejection and invited me to lead an OpenSpace session on wikis in education.  (You can see an early draft of the program here.)  It should be an exciting three days, and I’m hoping to come back with some excellent ideas for incorporating wiki-style approaches into my courses.  Full reports, naturally!  (Oh, and did I mention it’s in Porto?)

1. The Hartford Craigslist is apparently primarily read by people who say, “yes, I’ll pay the full asking price for item X,” only to write back a few hours later and say, “actually, can you take 60% of the asking price?”
2. Today (7/14) is the official release date for The Hold Steady’s Stay Positive, which you reallyreallyreally should own.  (Perhaps the thought of my 5-yr-old dancing around the living room singing, “Subpoenaed in Texas, sequestered in Memphis” will do it.)  Don’t believe me?  Here’re reviews by PopMatters, Pitchfork, and, less pretentiously, the Courant.  (Meanwhile, I’m almost positive Time.com‘s reviewer didn’t listen to the album.)  Anyway, you really should buy the physical CD, because it’s got the bonus tracks, crucially including “Ask Her for Some Adderall.”  Unfortunately, it’s not available digitally, except on YouTube.  I’ve been listening to this record for about 3 weeks now, and it’s gotten better with each listen. (And, *yes*, I bought a physical CD.)   Can’t wait to see this show in August.
3. After 4 days, I can report that the iPhone’s 2.0 firmware/software helps me unplug from random e-mail and blog-surfing.  Now that the iPhone can easily check my campus’s Exchange servers, I’m perfectly happy leaving my laptop off when I’m at home and the boy’s awake.  If I start to get itchy, I can quickly check for updates, without risking getting sucked into pointless web-browsing.  My computer’s been off more in the past 4 days than it has been in the past 18 months.
4. Do you want to know where my son would like all future presents to come from for the foreseeable future?  BrickArms.com makes custom Lego minifigs of WW2-era soldiers, as well as a variety of historical weapons and other accessories.  I showed him the website the other day, which I’d found after seeing this Lego recreation of raising the flag over Iwo Jima, and he’s been giddy ever since.  Like, “The Hold Steady new album” giddy.  “iPhone 2.0 firmware” giddy.

So, there you are: Hartford Craigslist: irritating.  The Hold Steady: Awesome.  iPhone: Awesome.  Custom Lego minifigs, especially of historical armies: Awesome.

Actual content returning soon!

First, Kevin Carey’s terrific op-ed on the changing role of student loan debt in today’s InsideHigherEd.com, as well as the comment thread, is terrifying, though sadly familiar.  A &I mordantly refer to our student loan debt as our second, nicer house.  Kidding aside, we will pay off our mortage years before our loans, which is awesome. Or maybe we won’t: One of our friends advised us–ironically, to be sure–that since we already have our house, we should just default on the student loans.

And second, the NAVSA (North American Victorian Studies Association) newsletter went up last week.   On the one hand, these involve quite a bit of work, and the list of members’ publications is genuinely impressive.  On the other hand, though, the problems with our univ.’s spam filter I mentioned a couple of months ago seem to have caused a few items to go astray, which always turns my stomach in knots.

In other words, it’s a Monday.

So, maybe you’ve read my post on going from the dissertation to the book, but you don’t know whether the final outcome is any good.  Lost Causes has gotten several reviews so far–in Novel, Clio, and The Dickens Quarterly–and they’ve all been pretty good, but I’ve been waiting to post much about them before it was reviewed in Victorian Studies.  And look what showed up in my campus mailbox this week: Volume 50, number 2.

Here’s Rick Rylance’s lede:

Jason B. Jones has written a concise, judicious, and lucid book with a forceful argument.  The argument is that despite commitments to historicism, many Victorian writers faced challenges to their assumptions because the past is irretrievable.  Empirically, this irretrievability is because there are inevitable gaps in the historical record; epistemologically, because the past cannot be understood thoroughly enough; and representationally, because realism cannot provide depictions adequate to the complexities of life and circumstance.  Jones’s questions therefore is: what did Victorian writers with historicist inclinations do with the gaps in knowledge, thought, and representation that arise inevitably from this scenario?  It is a good question.

At the end, he also picks up a note that I hope will get some attention when the book’s reviewed in Psychoanalysis, Culture, Society:

 The book ends on a mildly revisionary note about the future of psychoanalytic theory, proposing a readjustment away from the sexuality-led agenda towards “the relationship between time, causality, and being” (101).  This conclusion is as temperate as it is pithy and suggestive.

Relatedly, he explains what I think the point of psychoanalytic criticism might be–that is, why Victorianists should bother with Lacan:

For Jones, the past, shaped in a certain way, seducitvely masks the vertigo induced by our ungrounded psychoanalytic being.  Psychoanalytic method is not about the identification of hidden (or lost) causation, but the exposure of the inevitable gap between representation and the Lacanian “real.”

I’ll return to the four reviews over the next week or two, as they’ve raised a couple of points that deserve explanation.  But, on the whole, I’ve been delighted with the reception my little (134 pages, including index! It’s a bargain, especially when you buy the .pdf version.) book has gotten.

One of the unexpected joys of parenting has been the extent to which pediatricians seem to feel comfortable raising all sorts of hellish worries based on scant or flimsy evidence. It’s especially exciting when they do this in front of the kid in question, and the kid is one who listens intently to adults. Three examples:

• When A was pregnant, the 5-month ultrasound appeared to show that the kid’s cisterna magna was larger than normal values, by a little less than a millimeter. That bought us a trip to the “genetic counseling” room, monthly follow-up ultrasounds, and a series of scheduled post-birth appointments with a pediatric neurologist, because, we were told, the likeliest cause of such an enlargement is a disorder with the misleadingly upbeat name Dandy-Walker Syndrome. The neurologist came to one of our OB-GYN meetings, and the ob-gyn doctor gave us all sorts of pep talks about “you’ll be surprised at how much you will still love your child.”

All the way through, I’d been skeptical, because if Dandy-Walker were really the problem, then it seemed as if the boy’s brain would look worse on the ultrasounds. The proof was going to be a CAT scan after he was born.

Naturally, the scan showed a cisterna magna well within normal bounds, and that there were no brain abnormalities (except for ones indicating awesomeness). The neurologist who interpreted the CAT scan said the problem appeared to be 2-fold: 1) the fact that fetal development isn’t uniform, and the boy was pretty big, and 2) the fact that the ultrasound kept getting his head at a bad angle, and so there was at least some chance that the problem was one of forced perspective, rather than anything actually being enlarged.

On the one hand, that was great news; on the other hand, the plausibility of those two explanations should have occurred to someone earlier on in the process. There was no warrant for gloom-and-doom scenarios based on the extant data.

• Fast-forward to a couple of weeks ago. One of the boy’s blood pressure readings is, not absolutely high, but a little higher than one might expect. The doctor says–in front of the boy!–“It’s probably nothing, but let’s do some blood work to rule out kidney failure.” Kidney failure! So, naturally, 10 minutes of questions ensue.

We get the blood work (after days of the boy asking worried questions about his heart), and, naturally again, everything comes back fine. The doctor called to update us about the results, and said, “You know, it wasn’t really out of range, and he’s *very* tall for his age, so no worries.”

Now, I’m prepared to admit that abnormal values should be investigated, but, again, tone & presentation matter so much. Rather than lead with “kidney failure,” how about something else? (And thanks, too, for giving “hypertension” as the diagnosis on the lab form, so that some future insurance company can reject him for having a pre-existing condition.)

• Finally, he had to have the TB test for kindergarten. I knew he would probably have an ambiguous result, because I get them. Sure enough, he had a 9mm red bump, which is within normal range for people outside of high-risk groups. What did the doctor do? Engaged the boy in a discussion of needle-sharing and other practices that might make someone “high-risk.” Remember that he’s 5!

We are actually on balance happy with our doctors, and the boy has had some strange bad luck (“toddler fracture” at 15 months, due to a playground mishap), but I will say this: The next doctor who trots out alarmist rhetoric without attending to 1) the boy’s size for his age and 2) his overall excellent health is going to get punched.  (Well, probably not punched–but I will write another pissy blog post.)  And the next doctor who starts spinning out worst-case scenarios as if the boy doesn’t listen will get rudely interrupted.

We are grateful for the boy’s overall health, and I don’t want to invoke the karmic gods or anything, but it does seem to me that at least 2 of these situations could’ve been handled with a lot more humility and tact.

The July issue of Bookslut also has my review of Ciaran Carson’s book of poems, For All We Know.  Here’s a taste:

The final poem in the collection, “Zugzwang,” captures this perspective eloquently. Zugzwang means “compulsion to move”: it names the phenomenon, in a game, wherein one must move, although one would probably better off holding steady. (Zugzwang frequently arises in chess, a game alluded to in “The Shadow.” ) What better word to capture the ambivalence of surviving a relationship? Carson writes:

as the words of the song when remembered each time around
remind us of other occasions at different times;

as the geographer traces the long fetch of the waves
from where they are born at sea to where they founder to shore

so I return to the question of those staggered repeats
as my memories of you recede into the future.

These final six lines, gathering as they do many of the collection’s signature obsessions, delivers a powerful emotional charge. In particular, the last line’s ability to capture the erasure and maddening persistence of memory is breathtaking.

As I say in the review, this is one of the most interesting new books I’ve read in a while.