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. 

This is a great example.  Bound copies of conference programs easier to use and encourage actual conference panel attendance.  How many of you go to every panel you preselect in advance, and how many of you (like me and Undine) change your mind on the fly and go to different sessions entirely?  That can’t happen without a full program.  Why put on a conference if you’re not interested in making sure audiences can find the panels they want to see?  With all of the petroleum burned for travel by conference attendees, worrying about the paper used for printing a conference program seems like an almost pointless gesture.  (Let’s face it:  the greenest of all possible conferences isn’t as green as everyone staying home and skipping the meeting.)  I think it’s smart to ask your membership or registered participants if they want a hard copy of the program–that would be frugal and responsible without depriving the interested membership of a printed program.

Besides, moves like not printing conference programs don’t actually save paper, they just shift the paper use to somewhere else.  (Undine notes this too, and complains about administrators expecting meeting attendees to print up their own copies of documents.  “Uh, no. That’s not part of the deal. My home printer is not at your service. In these cases, I exercise my Thoreau-given right to civil disobedience and bring the laptop with me to the meeting with the documents loaded on it.”)  I’ve tried printing a few pages from a conference program and found that I used nearly as much paper as a printed program would have, just to print up a day’s worth of panel descriptions.

She concludes her musings on paper as a viable technology with this:

Another thing about administrators and technology: even though I like technology, it seems wrong to me that administrators are so dead keen on it that they care less about how it’s used than if it’s used. Faculty are now evaluated in part on whether they use technology or not (see The Chronicle for tsk-tsking about the sad sacks who don’t), and I think it’s because administrators are entranced by the shiny and in love with anything they can name and count. Good teaching = can’t be counted except by student evals. Teaching with technology = something to count.

Back to paper. I guess what I’m trying to say is that there are all kinds of technologies that we can choose from, and we shouldn’t shy away from paper if it’s the best one.

Right on.  Administrators love technology, because people think it’s doing something magically special for education so they buy it and want professors to use it regardless of its actual strengths and powers.  I refused to use PowerPoint in my lectures for a number of years, because all I saw was that it was being used badly without adding anything beyond what an overhead projector could accomplish.  At my former university in the late 1990s, I sat through countless meetings run by administrators in which we were subjected to bad PowerPoint lectures in which the administrators did nothing more than read the words on the slide and give us a Xeroxed stack of meeting slides so we could follow along ourselves.  Now, that was a stupid waste of paper.

Paper has stood the test of time.  Microfilm?  Microform?  Microfiche?  Faxes?  MS Word ca. 1986?  Your BASIC programming homework on 5-1/2 inch truly floppy “floppy discs?”  Your college emails on a VAX system?  The PDFs of articles you downloaded last week?  Not so much.

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!  (What’s the margin of error on that?)  A five percent decline does not impress me.  In fact, it’s pretty appalling that only about a thirdof students believe that copying from the Web is “serious cheating!”  That’s the problem right there, and it has nothing to do with the internets, friends.  (Would we really be satisfied knowing that merely 34 percent of our students thought that copying from the web was cheating?)

Finally, that old urban legend about plagiarism surfaces at the end of the story.  (And when I call it an “urban legend,” I don’t mean to suggest it’s not true–only that it’s such a common story about plagiarism that it’s like a bad joke that refuses to die.  I guess we need another term to describe phenomena like this–can any anthropologists or communications people help me out with some technical jargon here?)

Many times, said Donald J. Dudley, who oversees the discipline office on the [University of California, Davis] of 32,000, it was students who intentionally copied — knowing it was wrong — who were “unwilling to engage the writing process.”

“Writing is difficult, and doing it well takes time and practice,” he said.

And then there was a case that had nothing to do with a younger generation’s evolving view of authorship. A student accused of plagiarism came to Mr. Dudley’s office with her parents, and the father admitted that he was the one responsible for the plagiarism. The wife assured Mr. Dudley that it would not happen again.

HA-ha.  The only person making any sense in this story is an undergraduate Senior, who points out that “plagiarism has nothing to do with trendy academic theories. The main reason it occurs, she said, is because students leave high school unprepared for the intellectual rigors of college writing. ‘If you’re taught how to closely read sources and synthesize them into your own original argument in middle and high school, you’re not going to be tempted to plagiarize in college, and you certainly won’t do so unknowingly.’”  Yes–exactly.  It’s not hard to understand that if you take words from someone else and put your name on them–even if you can’t find the name of an author for attribution–that’s plagiarism, and the definition of it never goes out of style.

Someday, somehow I’d like there to be a serious conversation about how budget cuts and increasing class sizes make it liklier that student will engage in academic dishonesty, because 1) they feel anonymous in class, and 2) it’s nearly impossible for professors and adjunct lecturers to stay on top of student work in classes with more than fifty students.  I’d like to talk about how the people who run colleges and universities are actually responsible for this speed-up culture in universities in thinking that they can get more of something for nothing by cramming more and more students into our classes.  I’d like to talk about how this kind of cynicism starts at the top, with the bogus belief that we can have Excellence Without Money, to borrow Roxie’s term again.

That’s just my two cents.  What’s yours?

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. 

I’ve heard that children can get helicopter parents off their backs if the child agrees to check in by phone once or twice a week on a regular schedule.  Maybe some children need to be told to call only once a week on a schedule, unless it’s a real emergency.

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.

Even as I sit here smugly with my dog-chewed towels, I look back on a not-so-distant past in which I had a much smaller carbon footprint, mostly due to personal poverty.  Back in graduate school/medical school days, I took trains instead of planes for intercity travel, and I didn’t have my own washer/dryer or dishwasher.  I also didn’t own a car for most of that period–I hoofed it for everything.  When I moved in with Fratguy, we had an apartment in Baltimore–Baltimore!!!–without A/C!  I will confess that that summer, when the temperature in our apartment was 81 degrees at 7 a.m. one day in early July, I bought a window unit so that we could have a cool bedroom.  (As I recall, we used to eat dinner and even entertain in that bedroom, simply because it was our only refuge.)  When we moved to Boston the following summer, we took an apartment that didn’t have a refrigerator, so we stacked two tiny dorm fridges on top of one another and made do.  (We had a screened-in porch that year that doubled as a gigantic extra refrigerator after mid-November.)

Cox makes another point about the benefits of ditching A/C–maybe people would go outside and connect again with each other.  If you and a number of your neighbors skip the A/C, think of other benefits for your town:  movie theaters would be thrilled to have your business during hot days and evenings, and think of the spike in popularity the public libraries and swimming pools might enjoy!  To what extent is air conditioning responsible for the decline in civic spirit and civility in the past forty years?  Maybe people would be more willing to pay taxes to support their local parks, pools, and recreation centers if they were more popular.

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. 

My brother played army a lot and carried his guns in a purse when he was a child, and yet he neither grew up to enlist in the military nor carries a purse now at the age of 39.  When I was a kid, my entire room was lined with mini-kitchen appliances, and I wrote stories at school about how I wanted to grow up to be a “housewife.”  (And you can see how that turned out for me.)  Both of us loved making “forts” with blankets and couch cushions, and yet neither of us sleep regularly on the floor and in fact both of us live in traditional houses now.  It must be a genuine miracle of nature that we grew up to have different interests than our play-selves did at periods in our childhood!  (Somebody better go round up all of those little boys I played astronaut with back in the Apollo-mission days, because none of them grew up to be astronauts.  Test them!  Inject their sons and grandsons with untested hormones!)

(H/t to Vance Maverick for introducing me to the supremely creepy Hans Bellmer.)

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.

Full disclosure:  I was contacted by a historian in May whose new book has just been published.  She contacted me because I’ve mentioned (quite favorably) her first book here before, so she thought I might be interested in reading and commenting on her new book.  It’s a biography of an early American woman, and clearly of interest to me and to many of my readers.  I accepted a free copy of the book and will post a review and some questions for discussion.  But that, so far, is the extent of the swag, bling, or items of value I have accepted over the two and a half years since I started this blog.  I will consider accepting books on a case-by-case basis, and only if I’m asked in advance.  This seems like a reasonable compromise, since publishers frequently send books to journals in the hopes of getting a review.

What do you think?  Is that above-board and non-profit enough for  you?  (Or am I just too much of a Silence Dogood for some of you?)  For those of you with your own blogs, how have you handled the advertising question?  (And just how much money are you making on your blog?)

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. 

All three trends, Ms. Badinter writes, “boast about bringing happiness and wisdom to women, mothers, family, society and all of humankind.” But they also create enormous guilt in a woman who can’t live up to a false ideal. “The specter of the bad mother imposes itself on her even more cruelly insofar as she has unconsciously internalized the ideal of the good mother,” she writes.

Ms. Badinter, 66, a professor at the elite École Polytechnique, says that the baby has now become “the best ally of masculine domination.”  [Ed. note:  good line!  But of course we can't explore that idea in the New York Times.]

It is an argument likely to resonate among American women who must decide whether to embrace the notion that breast-feeding, washing diapers and remaining home with their children is morally or politically superior to pursuing a career.

Whigged out!

Yes, I’ll repeat that last sentence again for its sparkling lack of originality, since it could have been written in 1820, 1848, 1870, 1895, 1915, 1942, 1968, 1987, and/or 2010:  It is an argument likely to resonate among American women who must decide whether to embrace the notion that breast-feeding, washing diapers and remaining home with their children is morally or politically superior to pursuing a career.  Just for today, let’s ignore the fact that most women don’t have a “decision” to make about remaining in the paid labor force, m’kay?  Let’s pretend, as the New York Times pretends, that all women are white, middle-class or upper middle-class native born women whose labor isn’t necessarily needed to keep their families alive, fed, clothed, and sheltered.  Even then, that sentence makes no sense whatsoever, so once again, we award the Whig of Illusory Progress to the New York Times!

Good lord.  There really is no history or memory of feminism or feminist activism in this country, is there?  And whose interests does that serve, friends?  It’s the Groundhog Day of social justice movements, in which each generation “rediscovers” these same stupid “conflicts” over and over again, and is distracted by fighting with other women without ever asking, who manufactured “the conflict?” 

But, back to Badinter.  I have to read the book–her ideas about ecofeminism and essentialism resonate with what I’ve seen and observed myself, but again, I have to read the book.  Nevertheless, reading the New York Times appears once again to be a colossal waste of time if you want to learn anything about teh wimminz.

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. Given this, what is the essential function of the student but to learn? Learning at its very core is about internalizing a set of concepts into the student’s personal conceptual framework so that they can utilize the materials rather than simply regurgitate them. This is an active process, not one that is done through passive content consumption.

There are some that will argue that social media (twitter and such) can be used in an active way, but I have not observed this in students. It is difficult enough to get students to work outside the time I have them in class so I would rather focus on getting them to work in class. The use of the whiteboard means I can focus their attention without them waiting for the PowerPoint to be downloaded later. The lack of podcasts means they have to be engaged in class rather than simply downloading the lecture later. The use of in class notes for assessments (through, heaven forbid, quizzes) and holding them responsible for outside reading (again through quizzes) means that mastery is required before the exams.

.       .       .       .       .       .       .       .      

In the end I have not become a complete Luddite (students still text and surf in class, but are asked to leave when it is disruptive), but I am far from the technocrat I began as. So my colleagues may continue to drink deep from the well of the always connected generation while I proudly trudge up to my classroom with a pocket of dry-erase markers.

I’m with you, Wes.  I’ve started giving a little speech on the first day of class in which I inform them that I won’t be posting notes or PowerPoint lectures on the class WebCT page, because I think there is value in coming together three times a week to talk to each other.  If they want to take an on-line course instead, they can be my guests, but what I do cannot happen outside of the fellowship of the classroom.  In the classroom, we can talk to each other and ask questions.  On Mondays when I lecture, I can see if they’re following along with interest, I can see if confusion flits across their faces, and I can recalibrate on the spot to try to make sure my points are clear and understandable.  On Wednesdays and Fridays we discuss the weekly reading assignments and some primary sources.  We can make connections to other course readings and new ideas and questions might emerge.

I’m not so naive that I believe that every student experiences my classes in the way I hope they will–just because I’m talking doesn’t mean that anyone is listening or learning.  Students can still be distracted, disengaged, and unprepared in class.  But there’s a greater chance of engagement happening in this classroom than if I posted notes and podcasts on-line and told them to tweet me their reactions to the weekly readings instead of writing a 1-2 page summary and analysis of it.

There are a lot of things worth doing in person, with just a few dry-erase markers.

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.

This show is an interesting time capsule from 1966 for other reasons:  the use of cutting-edge Cold War spy technology like audio bugs and a gigantic “portable” reel-to-reel tape machine.  Please note:  the business lunch with Darrin and Tate does not appear to have been even a one-martini lunch, let alone a three-martini lunch.  But, Darrin does have a martini at a bar with Tate later in the show.  (I’m not the first person to connect Mad Men to Bewitched, alas–here’s a detailed comparison of Don Draper and Darrin Stevens.)

"Call me Snake."

Speaking representations of technology in pop culture:  hands-down, the funniest representation of future-iffic technology I’ve seen in the past decade came from watching Escape from New York (1981), starring the still-hunky Kurt Russell as Snake Plissken.  As some of you may remember, the movie is a dystopic vision of the city as a prison in 1997.  At one point toward the end of the movie, this mobile phone that must be held with two hands makes a hillarious appearance:

(Thanks to The Boston Globe’s “Braniac” for the screen capture!)  I especially like the huge clips or buckles on the side.  Very cutting-edge!