Applejack

Posted on September 2, 2010 by cbd

Fred: And while you’re out, get me some applejack, some mineral oil, and some Pluto Water.

Lamont: Pop, what do you need all that stuff for?

Fred: The applejack make me sleep. The other stuff make me get up.

(via a random NPR podcast)

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Lucid Lynx

Posted on August 31, 2010 by cbd

At the beginning of the summer, I formatted my office PC and told WIU computer geeks they could use it for someone else. When I returned to campus in August, it was still in my office. So I decided to give Ubuntu 10.04, the Lucid Lynx, a try. I had been running a previous version of Ubuntu for a year or so, and it would have been time to upgrade anyway. The default installer asked if I wanted to encrypt my home directory. Why yes, I do!

Installation hung up at the end. That worried me a bit. But after a hard reboot, things worked great. I can’t believe how fast it is. Startup takes less than 30 seconds. Restarts are even faster. Firefox loads nearly instantly and runs great. (Part of that is my decision to go without Flash, at least for now.) Same for OpenOffice, emacs, and Thunderbird.

Fonts still suck, as they always have. Other than that, Ubuntu impresses me again.

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Odds and ends schoooltime

Posted on August 30, 2010 by cbd

Bad news first. I am sad to acknowledge that for the second time in 18 months, a chair search for English & Journalism has been halted by the WIU administration. This void is particularly painful since an offer was extended, accepted, and once-incoming chair Derek Parker Royal formally introduced to the faculty and college. The department was visited by the provost August 19 and was visited by the president today, August 30. Information is scarce, like last time, and that’s deeply frustrating. My department is really hurting, and I can’t help but feel guilty about stepping away to focus on my research. Though I have mixed feelings about it, I will disengage–I skipped a faculty meeting last week, the first time in years–but it’s very hard to ignore what’s happening, and impossible not to be simultaneously outraged, sickened, and ready to walk away.

Add that to Lumper’s death and other family matters, and that’s why I wrote on Facebook: Dear September, I see you out there on the horizon. Please be less intense than August. Thanks! With that in mind, let’s shift to the many things in my life which, like my girls, are pleasantly intense:

  • I am getting into a good rhythm for sabbatical leave. Each day last week, I did some research and writing, worked on the house, did a little busy work (like sorting old files), and enjoyed some family time. Yes.
  • Being on sabbatical and still on campus is a little weird. The usual busy-ness is just a backdrop, not a force pushing me forward. I am not participant, only observer.
  • Amelia’s first week of day care went extremely well. She’ll be in Horrabin thre days a week. When I dropped her off Wednesday, one of the student workers laughed, “Here comes the party!”
  • Not surprisingly, Madelyn also had a fantastic week, though we had to hold her out Thursday because of pinkeye. She’s over that now (and hopefully I am too). This fall Madelyn will be in four days a week.
  • Yesterday I ran 4.25 miles, alternating quarter-miles walking and half-miles running. This morning, none of the foot pain I was dealing with since mid-April. I still have two splinters in my right foot, and those spots hurt a little. But nothing else. My GP should take care of those in a week or so. Hopefully I will be able to continue to add miles and get back to regular running. I have missed it terribly. I’ll be keeping it slow and short for quite a while. No speed work until November, at the earliest.
  • Our annual August home repair push, focused on our front and back porches, is almost complete. The front porch is finished, and we’ve got one finish coat left to do on the back porch. I’ll keep investing time in housework every week, but don’t plan any of the 12-hour days I booked in early August any time soon.
  • Erin and I ate at Shiloh’s on Saturday, the restaurant which replaced Il Spazio. There were a few more glitches than we’d hoped for, but the food was quite good: I had blackened fish, and it was fresh, well-seasoned, and nicely presented. I hope they make it, given that Macomb continues to be restaurant-challenged.

And now back to that reading and writing.

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More on slow numbers

Posted on August 28, 2010 by cbd

At Western, courses started last Monday, and though we don’t have the ten-day numbers yet, I’m still thinking about declining enrollment in my department, particularly our composition program, and my WPA presentation about it, which I’m slowly expanding into an article. (Yay, sabbatical.) At the conference, I heard about several other schools in similar situations, including Northern Illinois. And every community college faculty member I encountered spoke of huge increases. For example, Eileen Ferretti at Kingsborough CC noted they’ve seen a 40% jump in enrollment over the last year. They’re having trouble finding room for classes. These are just two stories, preliminary evidence that the changes we are seeing at Western are not unique to us. The conversations I’ve had confirm my thinking: it will be very hard to reverse this trend by enacting new requirements, changing transfer rules, or otherwise trying to force students back into courses. All of those actions amount to trying to preserve our monopoly on composition. I don’t think we can continue thinking only in terms of protecting that monopoly (weak as it is). We have to strengthen other parts of our program, and find ways to become more flexible.

As usual, I turn to computing for inspiration: what about Agile? There’s a strong parallel between many writing programs and traditional software development methods Agile position itself against. Both are focused on single products which take years to develop and change infrequently. Both are organized in a “waterfall” pattern, with clear delineation between stages, and linear progression: programs are designed, coded, debugged, and shipped; in composition, students are tested, placed, and sequenced. Both traditional development and traditional composition assume, perhaps unwittingly, that customers will keep coming back—and have to keep coming back.

I think we can adapt Agile’s core values to build a new philosophy for writing programs. What would it mean, like the Agile folks, for writing programs to favor the left side of these oppositions?

  1. Individuals and interactions over processes and tools: focus less on the processes and tools of our composition course sequences, and their assumed knowledge transfer to upper division courses, and more on evaluation of student writing capacity and engagement. Increase attention to individuals, and seek more interaction with other parts of the university.
  2. Working software over comprehensive documentation: be more willing to experiment, sacrificing formality for innovation. Break out of course- and track-oriented thinking when possible. Seek curricular structures which allow for changes which don’t require a lot of paperwork. Provide documentation with form and content consistent with other principles here, but never at the cost of production.
  3. Customer collaboration over contract negotiation: here “customer” can be read broadly, both as students (yes, I know that raises eyebrows) and other educational institutions. In the first case: do we turn often enough to students (directly and indirectly) when determining requirements, tracking them through programs, and understanding their progress? In the second case: how do we approach working with community colleges? High schools considering dual enrollment? Other areas of the university?
  4. Responding to change over following a plan: might be the most difficult to disrupt since universities love their strategic plans (especially WIU; “Higher Values in Higher Education” is locked down as the main feature on the WIU web site). For me, the approach should be allowing change to feed back to revisions in the plan. Management should also ensure the freedom to respond exists, avoiding micromanagement or imposition of interpretations of plans in a manner which crushes individual ability to respond to (or even anticipate) change.

Certainly, we can map some things already happening in writing programs onto these broad ideas: WAC hopes to build university-wide relationships; portfolio assessments ask students to think about writing over long time spans, etc. But the point here isn’t to find correlations between existing practices and Agile; that may be interesting, but it’s more evaluative than generative. Rather, I want to conceptualize approaches and practices better fitted to what I see as the strengths and weaknesses of our programs today–not last year’s, or those from five years ago.

I’ll post another update once those 10-day numbers come out.

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New WIU website

Posted on August 27, 2010 by cbd

Not long ago an xkcd strip about university web sites made the rounds. I even had two people send it to me on the same day!

XKCD on university web sites: Venn diagram of user needs and what's delivered

Over the summer, WIU started rolling out its new website. There are quite a few changes behind the scenes which don’t show to the casual user. A new content management system (CMS) was licensed, and I don’t know all the details, but as usual implementation was slowed when a considerable gap appeared between what the vendor promised and what they actually delivered. (Insert “We should have gone with open source” aside here.) So the rollout has been rather gradual, and there are many high level sites at Western, such as the Registrar, still using the “old” (2006?) look. Other sites are mixing it up, like English & Journalism, which, thankfully, I no longer manage.

Overall, I’m still very glad we are ditching the old look. And I’m glad to see some changes from the mockup, especially the width, which was 1100+ pixels before. The 960px width is effective and gives folks like me who often use smaller screens more flexibility. But of course, I still have criticisms. Hopefully constructive.

Last summer, I shared the review I submitted about the mockup WIU circulated for feedback. I concluded by saying:

Finally, the home page is just one piece of the pie. Current WIU web pages have excessive navigation on most pages, making design of pages very difficult. Given that I can’t see what child pages look like, I would give this design an “Incomplete” if I had the option. I hope that a horizontal navigation scheme will be used on child pages.

Now that the new design is out, child pages have emerged, and I’m afraid the navigation issues which plagued the previous design remain. The main navigation for the university includes the old navigation structure (Academics, Admissions…) and adds audience-specific options and more. The end result is a little overwhelming, and some of the choices are still questionable. Navigation for individual sites remains vertical with popouts. As a consequence, long pages (like, say, this graduate school page on travel awards) have a fair amount of trapped whitespace on the left margin. Breadcrumbs have been added, which I have mixed feelings about: does a university really break down into such a neat, hierarchical system? Do all sites need breadcrumbs? Should they map onto navigation categories? Note also the widely different approaches to navigation: compare the yellow popouts for the libraries with the grey ones for English & Journalism. “Home” links are sometimes at the bottom of navigation (Provost), sometimes at the top (Administrative Services), and sometimes absent (uTech). I think the site needs fewer links in the header and footer, and guidelines for site-level navigation.

I find a strong disconnect between the page hierarchy, visual and otherwise. The university branding and navigational structure overpowers the content. For example, here’s the front page for Equal Opportunity and Access. “Equal Opportunity and Access” is visually buried on the left side, and not a clickable link. It’s in the breadcrumbs, though. I wonder about this repetition. This name of the organization–pretty important, if you ask me–is shoehorned into a small rectangle, wrapping awkwardly. Units like the “Department of Computer Science and Information Systems” or the “Vice President for Advancement and Public Services” will have to abbreviate. (I can’t imagine international studies folks are happy about “School of Distance Learning, International Studies, and Outreach” getting abbreviated to “Distance Learning” online.)

Headlines are strange, too. The actual headline and title of the above page, “Office of Equal Opportunity and Access,” carries an H3 weight. Here’s the complete hierarchy:

  • H1: Western Illinois University: Macomb Campus
    • H2: Audience Menu
    • H2: Web Tools and Search Bar
    • H2: Top Navigation
    • H2: Equal Opportunity & Access
    • H2: Side Navigation
      • H3: Office of Equal Opportunity & Access
        • H4: The Role of the Office
        • H4: What is Affirmative Action?

So the actual content is displayed here as a subset of both the University site (H1), and after multiple navigation headers (H2). Hrm. I’m not sure why “Office of Equal Opportunity and Access” comes after everything. It’s the content. It’s what users want. Shouldn’t it be first? (Side note: I don’t think I’ve ever used an H6 head on a web page. I could see doing that with this template, since only four headline levels exist for the actual content, and arguably the H3 should not be repeated.) Without knowing how the CMS software works, I can’t say how difficult a fix would be. Another way to say that: I hope this odd structure isn’t an artifact of a funky approach to headlines by the CMS.

We can see the same issues, too. Here’s a screenshot of the Office of the Provost front page, with red shading applied to the University branding and blue to site-specific navigation:

Provost's web page, highlighted

I have to think WIU-specific branding could be applied with fewer pixels … not to mention without making all pages look the same. I fear the branding is going to become like advertising on web sites: people will stop looking at it and using it.

The provost’s web page also highlights another problem: having two web sites, one for Macomb and one for the Quad Cities campuses. (Three, if you count the simply broken WIU.com, which should just redirect to the main site.) The sites are just different enough to be visually jarring. Go from WIU-QC to the provost, or EOA, and the colors, fonts, and navigation choices shift slightly: enough to make unfamiliar users feel a little lost. Certainly, there are campus entities site-specific to the Quad Cities, and separate sites for those make sense–but not under a separate umbrella. We are not two universities. Having two web sites gives a strong impression that we are. Without strong data to show the need for a separate site, it is a mistake.

There are also questionable differences between usual web site behavior and the WIU way:

  • The front page includes photos of interesting things. But they are not links. “Hey, here’s the cutest dog in America. But we’re not going to tell you why we have his picture here.” As XKCD points out, some people don’t care. But many do.
  • Phone numbers are separated with bullets: 309•298•1414. I’ve never seen this anywhere else.
  • Too much ALL CAPS in the header and footer.
  • URLs are full of underscores. Un-der-score. Three syllables. Yuck. Try explaining  that to someone’s mom over the phone.
  • URLs are often really long. Our site went from wiu.edu/english to wiu.edu/cas/english_and_journalism/ — when it should become wiu.edu/enj or wiu.edu/cas/enj/ if hierarchy is enforced.
  • Link text is often inconsistent. The front page says “EO/AA.” The employment page says “AA/EO.” And the office responsible for both is EOA, with the URL “equal_opportunity_and_access”. Which is it?
  • The WIU logo in the footer doesn’t link back to the home page.
  • No media-specific style sheets–so printing is a mess.

The most disturbing thing is that we spent goodness knows how much for this software and we are still using the crappy homegrown calendar that everybody hates and which is completely independent of our crappy groupware. But that’s a story for another day.

Most of these are solvable problems, and I hope some issues here are just kinks in the system. In the past, WIU web managers have adopted a typical Cathedral approach towards updates: few and far between. I hope they’ll be more incremental now that software is in place which makes that possible.

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Choppers!

Posted on August 26, 2010 by cbd

Two recent articles in the New York Times made me hear helicopter parents in the distance:

A perfect combination. This week, as classes started, I’ve seen parents escorting their children around campus. Some, like me, were taking their under-5s to preschool. Some were… err, I’m not sure what they were doing. Meaning well, I think, but probably not helping. First-year college students have a lot in common with kindergarteners. Both are dealing with a new institution for the first time, making a huge move away from parents, facing a new and quite stiff intellectual challenge, and likely dealing with a new set of friends. No wonder the parental response is similar. And similarly misguided. Both kindergarteners and first-year college students need, badly, for their parents to step away. I can’t understand the obsession with protecting kids from, well, anything short of unmitigated success:

Ms. Finke’s son, Benjamin, is soon to start kindergarten at 5. “There will be boys in his class who are a year or more older than him. They’ll be bored in class and then the bar will be set higher, and the kids who are the right age will find that they can’t keep up.” What will happen in gym when the larger boys are picked first for brute force, leaving the pipsqueaks languishing? “I’m afraid my children will feel inferior.”

I hope Ms. Finke doesn’t think that kindergarten won’t be the last time Benjamin has to deal with bigger, smarter, or just plain different kids. Though it’s no fun to watch your children get bullied, intimidated, or overshadowed by others, stepping in to make five-year-old Benjamin feel a little better won’t help him learn how to deal with this problem when he’s fifteen–or twenty-five, for that matter.

Book Hound I don’t mean to belittle the parents in these articles, particularly in the second one. I’m thinking about the same issues, too, given that Madelyn reads very well, uses our Mac proficiently, does some addition and subtraction, and is getting more and more creative. Will she be bored to distraction (literally) when she hits kindergarten, at five years and nine months? Will she be upset about being separated from her friends? Then what? Will Erin and I be dealing with the principal weekly? And then again with Amelia? Even if we didn’t have that worry–I totally hear the argument that American schools start too early. Some of those four year olds whose earnest parents put them in kindergarten early will be the seventeen or eighteen year olds who are one-and-done in college because they are just too immature to handle the freedom which often makes the first year more beer and circus than books and classes.

But for everything Madelyn does well, there are things she does rather poorly. Her fine motor control isn’t very good, and she’s impatient. When combined, that makes quite a few tasks very hard. Like writing: Madelyn flat out doesn’t like it, and does very little beyond signing her name. She prefers to type. I don’t want to say Madelyn isn’t well-developed emotionally, but she’s certainly quicker to cry or get angry than most of her peers. That’s changing quickly; just this morning she waited out a problem with her seat belt instead of crying about it. But still.

Which is to say that Madelyn, and Amelia, all the children mentioned in the articles above, could be considered ahead, behind, gifted, challenged, blessed, deficient, talented, and under-achieving… in some way. Fixing too much on ratings and rankings, especially at age two or four or five, is a fine way to get unnecessarily worried about kids who will be dealing with all kinds of expectations soon enough. Yes, let’s identify and deal with genuine developmental problems. But for heaven’s sake, let’s wait a moment to see how our kids respond to broken toys, difficult homework, or agonistic schoolmates before jumping up to handle those things for them.

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Lumper

Posted on August 24, 2010 by cbd

Before we got married, Erin and I lived together in an apartment in southwest Gainesville, not far from Norman Hall. Two rednecks lived in a house on the same property. One day one of them yelled over to us, “We got a cat!” He showed us a impossibly small kitten in a dirty shoebox on his front porch. After about two hours of listening to the cat crying, Erin had enough. She stormed out of the house and confronted our neighbors. “I’m taking this cat!” she yelled. They didn’t move. One of them nodded.

When I saw the cat up close, I was worried she wouldn’t make it through the night. She had a hernia, her gut was bloated from worms, and she was covered with fleas. Her fur was matted with blood and flea poop and who knows what else. And my goodness, was she tiny. After a haircut, bath, flea comb, and dinner, I held her in my lap. Then-kitten Big Kitty (d/b/a “Ricochet”) eyed her from a distance. She curled up in my cupped hands and fell asleep. A day or so later, the vet teared up when we brought the cat, now named Lumper, to her. “I’ve never seen a cat this small with worms this bad,” she said. But she made it. The vet corrected the hernia that gave Lump her name, and she grew up to be a sweet, gentle kitty–not to mention an able mouser.

Sixteen years later, we have said good-bye to our little girl cat. The digestive problems that plagued Lumper from her first day out of the shoebox (hence her nickname) just got too severe. Euthanasia is a very strange thing. We put it on the calendar, like getting the oil changed in the car, or going to dinner with friends. Erin canceled one appointment, and rescheduled. I took Madelyn to school and went to the office. That day, Erin took a few pictures.

One

Finally, the time came. The girls were great. Madelyn wrote Lumper a sweet good-bye letter that, later, we buried with her. She helped me dig the grave and picked flowers and asked questions I was very hard-pressed to answer. (Man, is that kid smart.) As Erin left to go the vet, Amelia said, “Good bye Miss Poo Poo,” and this morning, “Miss Poo Poo is sleeping.” Yes, she is.

If you know my wife, you might drop her a line and wish her the best and remind her that without her intervention, Lumper would have ended up riding that shoebox to the landfill. Instead, she had a long life with a family who will remember her with great joy.

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Suber on findability

Posted on August 20, 2010 by cbd

In the July issue of the Open Access newsletter, Peter Suber addresses findability when discussing the showdown between Nature’s publisher (NPG) and the University of California. (UC is balking at a 400% price increase for access to Nature and other journals.) For Suber, access is a greater problem:

Findability is no longer a critical issue, except for print-only journals or repositories carelessly configured to deter search engine crawlers. The latest studies show that finding or discovering relevant new work is now much easier than accessing or retrieving it.

Online sources are not differentiated by findability so much as by accessibility and brand.

Given my interest in the state of the English studies web, I’m thinking about these issues as well, and I need to spend more time with the two reports Suber references here. Like Suber, I agree that brands remain massively powerful. Accessibility is indeed a huge problem: many scholars can’t get their hands on articles which might have relevance for them because publication practices lock them up. (The other valence of accessibility, functionality for all users, is also an issue, but that’s not Suber’s focus here, nor mine.) I don’t want to essentialize my own experience, but I subscribe to quite a few journals because my library doesn’t have them. Sure, I can interlibrary loan articles I need, and do so frequently. But abstracts and keywords often fail to demonstrate that an article is relevant to a line of inquiry: there’s something to be said for access to the entire piece being considered. Given that WIU libraries have recently reduced the borrowing period for many books, this isn’t going to get easier anytime soon.

But I also wonder if findability is solved for English studies. Not only are quite a few of our journals print-only, but we are far more book-centric than many of the disciplines engaged in these reports. That points to a mountain of material which is indexed, if at all, in a manner which doesn’t necessarily map well to online searches. What’s online in English journals often comes with poor metadata, or none at all. Efforts like CompPile and eServer help, but at the cost of making research processes somewhat more complex (one has to check those sources as well as JSTOR, Google Scholar, etc). I imagine quite a few scholars in English studies still rely on traditional cross-references, as I do, when finding and gathering information.

This points to better understanding the relationship between findability and accessibility, not only as they are defined by librarians and other scholars, but in practice. For the scholarly communities I’m interested in, do the assumptions Suber makes pan out? What are the specific stumbling blocks which remain for both findability and accessibility? Would standards and/or collective efforts like arXiv.org provide methods for addressing the issues which remain? Do accessibility issues affect findability–and vice versa?

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Two conversations

Posted on August 16, 2010 by cbd

Me: Who’s Amelia?
Amelia: Me.
Me: What’s your name?
Amelia (with big smile): Madelyn!
Me: No! Your name is Amelia.
Amelia: No! I’m Lorelei.
(Repeat with Mama, Daddy, Grandma, Big-Wig, etc.)

Madelyn: Daddy! I’m ready to go back to school.
Me: Funny you say that! You get to go back Thursday.
Madelyn: Because I’m almost five!
Me: That’s right.
Madelyn (staring at the calendar): What day is today?
Me: Monday.
Madelyn (after 20 second pause): Is it Thursday yet?
Me: Nope. Still Monday.
(Repeat last two lines 8x.)

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Porches

Posted on August 9, 2010 by cbd

Erin and I have been pushing hard the past week or so to get our front and back porches renovated, working pretty much all day every day: cleaning, making repairs, prepping, painting. Thankfully, we’ve reached the stage where intensive work is no longer needed, and our pace can slow down. So far, the only major problem was that two lights I purchased from Lowe’s were both defective. Bleah.

Prepped windows

Now if the rain to the west would blow through so I could get another coat of paint on the front porch floor…

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