Historiann

Undine has some useful thoughts about paper and its irreplaceability.  She notes that there are some instances in our professional lives as academics when hard copies of documents are not just preferable, they’re irreplaceable:

Sometimes paper just works better, and we ought to be able to acknowledge that.

Example: An upcoming conference is making the program available either in e-form or in paper form. I applaud the decision on a conceptual level, but it left me in a dilemma. Since I felt guilty ordering the paper form because of all the green rhetoric surrounding the choice, I ordered the e-version, but who am I kidding? I’ve tried getting .pdfs on a Blackberry screen, and even if the document doesn’t fail to download and go into a holding pattern, which it does about 90% of the time, the print is too tiny to read.

What I’ll probably do is print some pages before I go, but I’d really rather have a booklet so that I can mark the sessions in case I change my mind later. I won’t know where I’m going at the conference, but at least I won’t have a conference program that pegs me as a Despoiler of the Earth.  Continue Reading »

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I call bull$hit on this article in the New York Times today, which suggests that “digital age” students just don’t think copying and pasting stuff from the world wide non-peer reviewed internets into their papers and putting their names on said papers is plagiarism. 

Digital technology makes copying and pasting easy, of course. But that is the least of it. The Internet may also be redefining how students — who came of age with music file-sharing, Wikipedia and Web-linking — understand the concept of authorship and the singularity of any text or image.

“Now we have a whole generation of students who’ve grown up with information that just seems to be hanging out there in cyberspace and doesn’t seem to have an author,” said Teresa Fishman, director of the Center for Academic Integrity at Clemson University. “It’s possible to believe this information is just out there for anyone to take.”

It’s the “I can’t help it–the intertoobz rewired my brainz!” story.  Riiiiiight.  What aside from a few of the most dumba$$ anecdotal examples is the evidence for this alleged generational cluelessness about plagiarism? 

In surveys from 2006 to 2010 by Donald L. McCabe, a co-founder of the Center for Academic Integrity and a business professor at Rutgers University, about 40 percent of 14,000 undergraduates admitted to copying a few sentences in written assignments.

Perhaps more significant, the number who believed that copying from the Web constitutes “serious cheating” is declining — to 29 percent on average in recent surveys from 34 percent earlier in the decade.

Wow!  All the way from 34 percent to 29 percent over nearly a decade!  Continue Reading »

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Unsound methods

Is it possible that “helicopter parents” are just responding to incredibly needy and dependent children?  (Is it possible that some children shouldn’t be sent away to college, but continue to live at home while they study?)

Mobile phones and the erasure of long-distance charges has enabled this kind of codependence, or whatever you want to call it.  I also completely understand the urge to answer the phone when a child is calling.  When I was in college, it never dawned on me to call my parents with every question or concern that popped into my head, and not just because it cost more money than it does now.  I was happy to be away from home and my parents–even if it meant screwing up or not taking care of myself as I probably should have.  Continue Reading »

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Stan Cox makes a provocative argument against air conditioning in Washington, D.C.  (He’s plugging a new book on the topic.)  Now this might be a bad time to consider ditching the old A/C, especially for you easterners who “enjoy” suffocating humidity all summer long and have recently suffered through a spate of 100-degree-plus days.  But I think it’s something we should talk about.  I can say with smug (if slightly sweaty) satisfaction that this is what summer at El Rancho Historiann looks like:

Families unplug as many heat-generating appliances as possible. Forget clothes dryers –post-A.C. neighborhoods are crisscrossed with clotheslines. The hot stove is abandoned for the grill, and dinner is eaten on the porch.

Line drying in such a dry climate makes my clean towels look and feel like something a dog chewed up and spit back out–but I’ll make the sacrifice!  Because my house is literally a one-story ranch house with large overhanging eaves, the inside of the house stays at least 20 degrees cooler than the outside.  A strategic use of shades on the South- and West-facing windows helps a lot, too.  We have a bedroom in the basement, in which we could sleep in an emergency since it’s always cool.  But, that hasn’t happened in 8-1/2 summers, so far.  Plus, it’s only really hot one month of the year out here–in July.

At the very least, I think Cox asks a good question:  why shouldn’t we consider shutting down a city in an extreme heat wave, just as we do when snow and ice storms make travel impossible?  We’d at least avoid having to air condition most workplaces and homes, and the absence of commuting would also save fossil fuels.  We westerners should really take the lead on taking out the air conditioning, since aridity is on our side.  Plus, those of us at altitude benefit from 30- to 40-degree swings in temperature from daytime highs to nighttime lows, so opening up the house after 7 p.m. to let in the cool night air makes a big difference. Continue Reading »

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This creepy doll by Hans Bellmer, 1935

I can’t let the coincidence of this pass me by, since we’re talking about dolls and the objectification of girls’ and women’s bodies again.  Squadratomagico has a great post up on the off-label hormonal engineering of baby girl fetuses who have tested positive for (gasp!) Congenital Adrenal Hyperplasia, which means that they frequently have ambiguous genitalia, may possess a strong interest in softball, and “as a group have a lower interest than controls in getting married and performing the traditional child-care/housewife role.” 

(Well, what thinking woman doesn’t agree with that last bit?  Seriously:  if you dig scrubbing crusty surfaces and wiping snotty noses and bums, that should be a symptom of clinical depression, not normative behavior in any adult, male or female.  Most of us do that junk because we don’t want the state condemning our houses and taking our kids away.)

Click immediately on this link to join the discussion.  I left a comment over there, so I’ll be following that thread.  Something else I didn’t mention in my comment is the odd equation of childhood behavior with adult predisposition for motherhood among these alleged sufferers of CAH:  “As children, they show an unusually low interest in engaging in maternal play with baby dolls, and their interest in caring for infants, the frequency of daydreams or fantasies of pregnancy and motherhood, or the expressed wish of experiencing pregnancy and having children of their own appear to be relatively low in all age groups.”  What a stupid way to think about children or the importance of play.  Continue Reading »

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I’m interested in placing a promotional link on your page: http://www.historiann.com/2009/01/06/modern-graduate-studies-and-the-value-of-historiography/.

The link would be for a website which has art schools and college reviews as its main keywords.

I have a limited budget, but hopefully there is a reasonable price we could arrange.

Please let me know if you’re interested, and if not thanks for your time.

Thanks!

I'll just do it myself!

Now, I know I’ve joked here in the past about “monetizing” this blog, and this isn’t the first e-mail I’ve received asking if I’d accept advertisement.  But, this e-mail has prompted me to clarify my advertising policy here once and for all:  THIS BLOG DOES NOT ACCEPT ADVERTISING OR DO PRODUCT PLACEMENT.  There was nothing wrong in asking–but I’ve added this statement to the “About Historiann” page linked above.  My brother-in-law, a web guru, designed the template and pays for my server space, and I do all the work except for the technical troubleshooting that he does for me.  That’s it:  we’re totally D.I.Y. here, friends. Continue Reading »

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Apparently, Le Conflit:  la femme et la mère by Elisabeth Badinter is big news in the Anglophone world now that it’s been translated.  (The title is usually translated as The Conflict:  the woman and the mother, a clunky and literal-to-a-fault translation if ever I saw one.)  The book was in the European press a great deal back in March, when I was in Paris for a week.  Well, according to more than one friend and reader, the “Fashion & Style” section of the New York Times has deigned to notice the book.  (Yes, that’s right:  feminism, motherhood, and la Querelle de Femmes is all just “Fashion & Style,” not fit for the Op-Ed pages, and not the news pages or the book reviews.  Why don’t they just go ahead and call it the “Women’s Page” again?)

I haven’t read the book yet, but it sounds intriguing.  The French are always much more serieux about their intellectual disagreements.  I get the sense too that feminism in France has always been understood to be a multifaceted social justice movement–le conflit among feminisms is inevitable and nothing new there, but in the Anglophone press which likes to manufacture girl fights, le conflit happens whenever a woman expresses an opinion on anything and another woman disagrees with her.

So just for fun, here’s the summary in the NYT.  Spoiler alert:  pay attention to the last sentence! 

In [the book, Badinter] contends that the politics of the last 40 years have produced three trends that have affected the concept of motherhood, and, consequently, women’s independence. First is what she sums up as “ecology” and the desire to return to simpler times; second, a behavioral science based on ethology, the study of animal behavior; and last, an “essentialist” feminism, which praises breast-feeding and the experience of natural childbirth, while disparaging drugs and artificial hormones, like epidurals and birth control pills.  Continue Reading »

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“Wes from Wolf Lake” offers some interesting observations about classrooms and technology:

When I started teaching full time (I spent many years in industry after grad school) I was enamored with using technology in the classroom. Countless hours were spent working on PowerPoint presentations, uploading podcasts and even designing my own animations for a web site I built (our faculty resources were limited at the beginning). My admins lauded me for using technology in the classroom and they encouraged me as a I moved into social media and my students subscribed to the RSS and Twitter feeds for the class. The college pushed forward with me and talked about how we could move more and more courses online and how the democratic world of social media liberated the students to discover their own learning path.

My classroom Luddite transition was insidious and gradual but I can definitely see how it began. For any of you old enough to remember the movie Real Genius you know the montage I am thinking of, where the young student comes to a classroom that becomes filled with fewer and fewer students and more tape recorders as the semester progresses, to the point that the last shot has a room filled with tape recorders and a tape recorder playing at the front of the room. Over the years, this is how I had begun to feel in the classroom. The modern equivalent has been the students frantic to know when class podcasts would be posted and demands for the course PowerPoint presentations. Couple this with the incessant texting and web surfing in the guise of “course work” and I realized that this addiction wasn’t doing the students any good.

I have never used technology this way precisely because of my suspicion that it would end up making class attendance irrelevant in the minds of the students.  Why should they show up, if we go to all of this trouble to imply that they can “do” class anywhere and everywhere but inside a room with us, two or three days a week?  Is there really no value in gathering together and communicating with them in a classroom?  (Not to mention the fact that canning our classes with technology this way just makes it easier for us to be nudged out of our jobs.  Why pay us for every class we teach, when the uni can just post our lectures on YouTube, our notes and handouts on BlackBoard or WebCT, and use a T.A. or hire a grader in Bangalore?  Do we really want to make this argument for administrators?)  It’s just interesting to hear this from a proffie who has stepped back from the brink.  Wes continues:

As the students became more and more dependent on the concrete information that I provided and less and less capable of the abstraction I required I started to reevaluate the role of technology in the classroom. This time I looked at the use of technology in the light of my time in industry rather than through the lens of the newest “student-centered” fads. In industry we definitely used technology, but it was to accent or facilitate not to replace the essential functions of the job. Continue Reading »

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402? He doesn't look a day over 21!

Just go read Flavia, and weep.

As I said in the comments, education works:  pass it on.  All I can say is thank dog she was teaching Paradise Lost and not Toni Morrison or Virginia Woolf.  Otherwise, she’d be accused of infiltrating the high schools with her subversive Marxist-feminist agenda ZOMG1!!1!111!!!  (And as we all know, that’s Historiann’s bailiwick.  Pass that on, too, willya?)

Speaking of dangerous subversives:  has anyone else out there actually read Milton?  Areopagitica was some pretty left-wing stuff in its day:  “As good almost kill a man as kill a good book: who kills a man kills a reasonable creature, God’s image; but he who destroys a good book, kills reason itself, kills the image of God, as it were, in the eye.”  In the words of the immortal Vanilla Ice:  word to ya mutha.

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Look at what I came across on Hulu recently–season 3, episode 8 from Bewitched!  If you recall, either from its original run or from watching endless re-runs of the show after school in the 1970s like me–Samantha’s husband Darrin Stevens was an ad man who worked for Larry Tate at the firm, McMann and Tate.  This episode is all about a rival ad agency’s attempts to steal McMann and Tate’s ideas (and clients): 

This show is an interesting time capsule from 1966 for other reasons:  Continue Reading »

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