*cough*hack*wheeze*

And I'm sick. Sore throat, tight chest, runny nose, coughing, and--bonus!--chills that come and go. Sleep is good, but being horizontal is not. Figure that one out.

Tomorrow I have a bunch of meetings and Friday I have workshops to give, so I must steel myself for two more days of 8-to-5 before I can recuperate on the weekend.

Yeah, wish me luck with that.

wheeeeeeze. . .

Two weird things

1. Lucas's latest game is mimicking the Roomba.* He walks in straight lines across the room, spinning around a few times whenever he changes direction. It's pretty damn adorable, especially when he falls down because he's dizzy. When I turned off Romba tonight, Lucas looked at it, astonished at its sudden silence, and tried to talk to it by making vacuuming noises.

2. I finally printed out the "revise-and-resubmit" manuscript I've had sitting on my desk for almost a full year. Had I done that a year ago, perhaps I would have gotten a job interview or two? Anyway, I thought it might as well follow through (finally) since I had already revised it and merely needed to write a cover letter.



*Roomba remains unnamed, though I'm leaning toward a name that would be appropriate for a horseshoe crab or other crustacean of the late Permian because Roomba is definitely carcinomorphic. Any carcinologists out there? (And aren't you proud an English major knows what carcinology is? I am. And you can bet I'm going to work "carcinomorphic" into my everyday conversations now that I've stumbled across the word.)

(crab photo by Lou Tamposi)

. . .as lit

You know the Bible 82%!

 

Wow! You are truly a student of the Bible! Some of the questions were difficult, but they didn't slow you down! You know the books, the characters, the events . . . Very impressive!

Ultimate Bible Quiz
Create MySpace Quizzes

Not bad for an atheist, eh?

Faculty poll: student access to prior course materials

I need your thoughts, oh wise professoriate.

If you had--hypothetically speaking, of course--created a bunch of course content in a learning management system (something like Blackboard or Moodle), would you want your former students to have access to that content? I'm talking about content like podcasts, any PDFs or docs you might have uploaded, tests and quizzes, etc.

For the purposes of this hypothetical, let's say you teach a course in the fall and again in the spring. It's the same course, but you have two different sites on the learning management system--one for the fall class and one for the spring. The sites will have a lot of identical content, but since you roll out content over the course of the class, the spring semester course starts as a relatively blank slate--you post content as students need to see it. Only students in the fall course can access the fall course site, and only students in the spring course can access the spring course site.

The question, then, is this: Should the fall students still have access to the fall course site once the fall course has concluded?

There seem to be two schools of thought:

1) Students should be able to access content from courses they've taken because they may need to review it for subsequent courses.

2) Students are lying, cheating bastards who can't be trusted not to pass test questions and other crucial course content to current students in the class. Therefore, the fall students' access to the fall course material may compromise the learning of the spring students.

What are your thoughts?


(Fox photo by Rob Lee, used under a Creative Commons license)

Candidate rejection etiquette

I've been pretty damn careful not to name names on this blog, but I'm making an exception this time: Cal State Fullerton Liberal Studies Department, I'm putting you on notice.


I've received an awful lot of rejection letters this job season, but all of them arrived on paper, on school letterhead, in envelopes. Get the idea?

Today I get an e-mail marked "high priority" from an administrative assistant. It says simply "Dear Trill Wing, Please read the attached letter. Thank you." And the attached letter is lovingly titled "Doc2.doc." Not even a PDF on school stationery with a scanned department chair signature. Boo!

As an added flourish, the signature of the administrative assistant includes "Happy New Year!"

I guess what's worst of all, really, is that this is the job that I totally wanted and felt I was a good fit for. And so did Fantastic Adviser, who went out of her way to write a special letter for this position. And it never feels good to hear that the school at which you thought you had the best chance didn't even think you merited a phone interview.

Still, I'm not so much miffed that I didn't get the position (since I'm happy in my current job) as I am about the utter lack of courtesy.

Oh yes, you're definitely on notice, CSUF Liberal Studies Department. On notice you are.

Why I shouldn't write e-mail when I'm tired:

Below is the text of an e-mail I sent this evening to bloggy friend Breena Ronan, who puts up with my shit because she thinks it's a burden for me to hear all her fabulous ideas. Anyway, the e-mail very much encapsulates why I shouldn't be teaching this quarter.

To give some context: I'm lecturing tomorrow in the American studies course I gave up teaching in order to take my new job. The topic is World's Fairs, specifically the 1893 Columbian Exposition, the 1939 fair in New York, and the unofficial "World's Fair" of 1964, also in New York.

I don't wanna read anything else. Wah!

I don't wanna write anything else! Meh!

If I see the word "trylon" one more time, I'm going to hurl.



On the other hand, there is this:



If you had to pick, which of these would you say best represents the World's Fair of today?

• Vegas
• Falconcity of WONDERS!
• Disneyworld/Epcot Center
  
• MacWorld and similar tech tradeshows crawling with venture capitalists and consumers

And don't say "Falconcity of Wonders!" just because you want to live in the Dubai Hanging Gardens of Babylon. (BTW, I call dibs on the 6,500 sq. ft. detached villa in the hideous "New World" style.)

trillwing

P.S. Did I mention I don't wanna work right now?

P.P.S. I am sooooo happy with my decision to give up teaching for the time being. Playing blocks with Lucas is far more fun. And more important.

Read the dialogue out loud

Me: I think I'll take Lucas for a walk. It might stem his ennui.

Mr. Trillwing: I'll stay here. I'm not ennui'd.

Kinda creepy, eh?

Even creepier was the pet dog I tested out. It looked freeze-dried.



And why isn't there an option to put some flesh on the bones of the avatar?

Random observations (household appliances edition)

• We now have a washer and dryer. A nice washer and dryer. It feels weird not to be pumping quarters into them after lo! all those many years of laundromat patronage.
• Mr. Trillwing has declared the dishwasher to be off-limits because it does not meet his exacting standards for clean kitchenware. Fortunately, Mr. T also happens to enjoy washing dishes, which I do not.
  
• Our oven, which is quite dated, proudly bears a logo proclaiming it was made by General Motors.
• My stovetop has led me to believe there's a reason the popular saying isn't "Now you're cooking with electricity!"
  
• Lucas likes to play chicken with our Roomba. Roomba always wins. Crying ensues.
• Roomba does not cry.
  
• I'm looking for a pet name for our Roomba. It's sage green in color. Please leave nominations in the comments.
  

Liveblogging (now with extra snark!): ELI Sesion on "Youth, Privacy, and Social Networking Technologies"

with Nancy Mitrano of Cornell University

Higher education must embrace web 2.0 for our own purposes, not commercial ones.

Pew Internet and American Life Project:

55% of online teends have created a personal profile online
66% of these teens say their profile is private
48% of teens visit social networking websites daily or more often

Older boys (15-17 y.o.) who use social networking sites are more likely than girls to say they've met new friends online. 29% of boys said they flirted; 13% of girls did.

(Bored yet? I am! How is this new?)

Oh, here we go. . . Rolling out the pedophiles with an anecdote about a girl meeting up with a scary man. Barbara Sawhill, next to me, is muttering: "That's bad parenting, not bad technology." Amen.

Bush/Gonzalez/FBI are protecting our children. Good. God. Am I really here? Someone save me. I thought my job was to protect my child from that triumvirate.

Audience member stands up and says she lets her 6-year-old son online onto the Disney kids' site, but she was with him as he explored the site's tutorial.

Praise from the speaker. "That's a great example."

What are we, at a PTA meeting?

"I learn a lot from Mickey."

Ugh.

Seriously, many of the speakers here have been stellar. This presentation, not so much.

Now she's saying we need to talk to our students so that we know how to connect with them.

Thanks for the enlightenment.

I'm shutting down my laptop to save the battery.


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