jill/txt

I am now incapable of writing “wow” without capitalising the final W. WoW. World of Warcraft.

Oh dear. Constant editings of conversationally written wows in emails and flickr comments…

I suspect that the blogging I used to have the students doing in previous iterations of this course probably saved a lot of student email. Students read each others blogs, asked questions and answered questions in them, and when they succeeded in a task they’d struggled with they blogged how they’d solved the problem.

The reason I haven’t had them blogging this year is that
a) Blogging was great with 30 students. I could track their blogs and I did a great job connecting the blogs and cross-linking and showing off good student posts and stuff. When the class grew to around 70 students I was overwhelmed - I don’t think it’s possible to keep track of such a large group. Even if you put a lot of extra time into genuinely following 70 blogs, I’m not sure you’d mentally be able to facilitate such a group in the way I think you need to do to get most students keen enough to put some effort into their blogs. Some students will get it instantly, of course. Others need more practice and experience to see what good it’ll do them. It’s helping them use their blogs to discuss and network that’s the challenge.
b) I’ve been very ambivalent to blogging in the last few months. I.e. blogging when you’re a slightly established academic rather than a grad student seems to be more about self-presentation than about communication. Maybe it always was in a way but it didn’t feel like it.

So maybe what I need to do is figure out a way of doing blogs - or something similar - in a large group. Perhaps there’d be a way of having students share the task of nurturing the network?

It’s great that students can so easily email their lecturers, isn’t it? Except when, completely hypothetically of course, you have 70 students in a class, 20 of whom don’t feel the need to turn up to lectures (most lectures aren’t mandatory in Norway, it’s a remnant of the old ideal of the independent student who should have the right to learn as she pleases) yet they all email you questions - you know, the “I won’t be able to attend any of the tutorials. What’s the assignment? Can you give me feedback?” kind of questions. And the frantic “Did you get my email?” the next day if you haven’t answered.

As a student tells the New York Times in a piece they ran on this today,

“If the only way I could communicate with my professors was by going to their office or calling them, there would be some sort of ranking or prioritization taking place,” said Cory Merrill, 19, a sophomore at Amherst. “Is this question worth going over to the office?”

Yeah. That’d be awful, actually having to spend time thinking about whether a question was worth asking, wouldn’t it?

I try to plot out research time (50% of the job after all) and keep it sacred by not checking email, or if I do check email - sometimes I need email for research - I filter all the student emails into a separate mailbox to be dealt with later. I wonder if it’d be easier if I simply had “office hours” for dealing with student questions which were clearly communicated to students and that I kept strictly.

Oh, and after learning the hard way, I now try never give any indication that I read student emails outside of regular work hours - such as, you know, answering their emails in the evening. I think my worst ever student email experience was the SMS question about XHTML tags and browser compatibility I got on a Sunday afternoon while walking in the mountains. No, I hadn’t given out my mobile number. Yes, I removed it from the phone book after that.

PS: MA students are different. I have four or five MA students at a time, not 70.

I’ve never met the head of the mathematics department here at the University of Bergen, but I already like him because he has a “head of department blog” that is exactly the kind of thing I think a head of department should do and yet I don’t seem to do it myself. I must have clicked some link on that blog by mistake because when time came to shut down all my programs so I can play World of Warcraft with as little computer-multi-tasking as possible, my address book was asking me if it should add this visit card. Belonging to the mathematician, “Karl Ove Hufthammer”, with the nickname “Huftis” noted and his homepage: huftis.org. Now this website seems to belong to a mathematics student, but you know, I had time so I went there, of course, and would you believe it, he has info on high-quality, free computer games, on XHTML and on how to correctly address letters to the US so they get to their destination as fast as possible.

My Christmas parcels took three and a half weeks to cross the Atlantic, and my letters routinely take 8 days while letters in the other direction only take five. So I had a look.

Turns out you should run your address through the official, computer-calibrated US address normaliser, leave everything in capitals and preferably use a computer to print your envelope so that its fellow computers in the US Postal Service can read the address more easily. And here I was thinking I wanted my letters to look human. Foolish. Human-looking addresses aren’t worth having your Christmas presents arrive in January.

I admit I did wonder what would drive anyone to write such a carefully crafted page about address normalisation of all things. The links at the bottom of the page to the hundred page manuals that exist on the topic give a hint, and the dry remark that accompanies the links more: “Personally I find a certain perverted joy in reading bar codes ‘by hand’.”

Anyway, letters from me to the US will henceforth be more precise, less human and faster.

Profgrrrrl has a very specific and useful post about how to answer that question, you know, the “how’s your work going” question. I’ve come to the same conclusions as she has, but not without previously falling into most of the traps she describes. The “Oh I’m so busy” trap (boring) or the launch-on-long-monologue-about-struggles monologue. Yes, they’re both really rather self-defeating and really won’t help. And that probably goes for students too. I think part of the problem is that as a student, at least when I was a student, a lot of the time you were supposed to do the “oh god my thesis is going terribly I’ll never finish” thing to co-students. It was part of our solidarity thing. Like the way you weren’t supposed to admit to getting good grades in high school. (Or was that just Norway or my suburb or something?) That’s really not a very constructive way of talking with colleagues who’ll be cooperating with you and participating in assessing your work, though.

Profgrrrrl also mentions how young female academics get the message we should dress frumpily and try to look older and as un-gendered as possible, well, I’ve definitely had that feeling too, not that anyone ever said so - when all your colleagues at meetings outside of your department are twenty years older than you and almost all male, you do feel like dying your hair grey and wearing a pant-suit and tie. Definitely not a way to help academia be more friendly to young women, though.

Look at these spikes in blog posts registered by Technorati compared to major (US) political events:

At the Norwegian blog contest I juried last year less than 10% of the submissions were “political blogs”. I wonder whether there’s any other way of interpreting those spikes than assuming they’re connected to mainstream, political, US news?

And what’s that downward spike just before Hurricane Katrina about?

So here’s a google search to show students: try searching the Chinese version and the US version of Google for “Tiananmen”. As in Tiananmen Square. Remember? If you’re in China, the government would rather you didn’t. (via Stayfree, Pen to Paper and others)

Finally! I’ve been dreaming of this since I was a child! Go on, the story’s even better than the result! (Unfortunately, via Satirewire)

Martin Grüner Larsen is a Dane who’s lived in Bergen for 17 years, and who’s currently working on an MA thesis in comparative literature about blogs as a form of essayistic literature. At least he was last time I spoke with him.

Point is, he went to Copenhagen a few days ago and his blog posts are excellent: about describing the sad ambivalence of discovering Denmark isn’t “home” or about the demonstrations and counter-demonstrations. (Martin often writes in English, but these posts are in Norwegian frequently slipping to Danish.)

I lost my iPod somewhere, somehow. I was thinking I’d replace it with a shuffle (so much more fiscally sound at a third the price), but luckily Thomas showed me his video iPod. I love it! There is no way I could be happy with a lesser model after spending five minutes with one of those. I’m in the US for a couple of weeks, so I ordered it from the Apple Store, and look it’s on its way! It’s only about 20 miles away right now!

I’m particularly fascinated that my iPod has been in Shanghai and Anchorage, Alaska. Someday I mean to visit those places too.

Are you as intrigued by tracking parcels as I am?

My very helpful librarian sent me a link to an author’s addendum for those contracts where you sign away your rights to publish your own article online. So next time a publisher sends me a contract, I can sign it and attach my copy of this addendum, making the contract palatable to me! Hooray! [edit: snipped grumpy unnecessary bit]

Scott sent me an article about identity online from the Baltimore Sun where we’re both quoted - Scott from a half-hour conversation with the journalist (I assume many of the ideas in the piece came from this) and me from an academic paper I wrote. That’s a first, a journalist quoting an article I’ve written - I love it! They even give me an interesting new identity of “Swiss academic”! I wonder what I’d be like if I were? Anyway, this reminds me of the article Marika mentioned the other day, José van Dijck’s article ‘From shoebox to performative agent: the computer as personal memory machine’ (New media and society 7 (3)). My research fortnight starts tomorrow. No teaching! not in the office! When in the office, my phone now rings on average three times an hour and someone knocks on my door twice an hour. Probably this is partly due to the start of semester, which means lots of students with questions, but a lot of it is general administration stuff too. I like people and this is clearly part of my job but it’s not condusive to focussed work of any sort, least of all research - and that’s part of my job too… Anyway, I’m going to read a lot. Here’s what I’ll be reading:

• The aforementioned article by José´van Dijck.
• N. Katherine Hayles: My Mother Was a Computer: Digital Subjects and Literary Texts
• Mark Hansen: New Philosophy for New Media (not sure yet how relevant this will be so I’ll see how much of it I read
• Gunther Kress & Theo van Leeuwen: Multimodal Discourse (because it’s about time, though I think I already know the content I’d better be sure, I mean, even Anders’s students are reading it)
• Some online e-lit and such. Haven’t selected it yet.
• Should I figure out what that post-theory stuff is, or is it already out of date?

I feel like I haven’t just read in years. Can’t wait.