repurposing the dissertation June 29, 2008
Posted by KC in life, writing.add a comment
I sometimes have my writing students take an essay they’ve written and find some creative way to rethink it for a different audience or different context — to “re-purpose” it. I thought about that assignment on a recent camping trip as I found a useful way to repurpose my dissertation…as kindling.
Okay, so these are just printed drafts (what my son calls “sloppy copies”), but there’s something therapeutic about burning words that you’ve spent so much time working on. You know that scene at the end of Return of the Jedi, when Luke torches Darth Vader’s remains on a funeral pyre? It was almost exactly like that.
Also, if you do it right, you can get the pages to burn so that they shrink, but you can still see all the words. It’s sort of like a textual shrinky dink.
just add sprinkles June 29, 2008
Posted by KC in life.add a comment
I’m not much of a cake decorator. I made this chocolate cake for my son’s birthday, but after applying the frosting, I felt like it wasn’t especially festive. It looked more like a large, brown hockey puck. So, I found myself some candy sprinkles (a pantry staple around here), and started throwing fistfuls at the cake. As you can see, enough of them stuck to make a decent presentation, though a good 75% of the sprinkles ended up on the counter and the floor.
There’s a metaphor for academic work in there somewhere.
scenes from a pirate festival June 19, 2008
Posted by KC in life.Tags: identity, photos, pirates
2 comments
Last weekend, we went to the Northern California Pirate Festival. This was basically like a Renaissance Fair(e), in that there were lots of people in costume gnawing on smoked turkey legs, with a key difference being that the preferred exclamation was “Yar!” instead of “huzzah!” There were planned events, like stage shows, music, and a cannon “battle,” but the real entertainment was provided by people who just showed up to get their pirate on.
As with all forms of participatory culture, dressing up like a pirate is fraught with all sorts of interesting identity implications. I was struck not only by the elaborateness (and apparent cost) of many costumes, but also how they signaled various forms of independence and marginality. There were “goth” pirates. There were monstrous pirates, lifted from second and third installations of the Disney franchise, and who scared the bejezzus out of my three-year-old. There were also many more corsets than one is accustomed to seeing on a daily basis.
There were also lots of examples of the Johnny-Depp-channeling-Keith-Richards type of pirate…rock and roll as piracy, or piracy as rock and roll. What struck me most, though, was the gentleman who came as a pirate castaway, dressed in rags that might once have been the costume of a lowly deck-hand, and playing the role of a sun-addled hermit. His unfortunate dental choices must surely hamper him in real life, but they made his performance quite convincing. He seemed a perfect metaphor for the “cast away” feeling that lots of the participants seemed to harbor. A pirate costume, perhaps, transforms a perceived sense of marginality into a kind of powerful identity. It’s what Clifford Geertz might have called “a story they tell themselves about themselves.”
Or maybe it’s just dressing up like a pirate.
For the record, I did not wear a pirate costume, but I did eat a turkey leg.
roll your own moodle June 10, 2008
Posted by KC in moodle vs. sakai.Tags: moodle, sakai, teaching
3 comments
A few months ago I wrote about how I missed using Moodle, and how it was way better than Sakai (which is ironically branded as “SmartSite” at UC Davis*). Partly as a result of writing those posts, I decided I couldn’t teach with Sakai anymore, and got myself my very own Moodle site, which I used to teach my courses this quarter. It was much easier (and cheaper) to set up than I would have thought. So, if you want to roll your own Moodle, here’s what to do:
- Rent some server space. I got everything I needed for $11 a month at Hosting Matters. I haven’t run into any space or bandwidth issues, even while hosting three course sites this quarter, one of which was taught synchronously in a lab (i.e., even with 25 students logging in at the same time). Make sure the server space you rent comes with what’s called the “Fantastico auto installer.”
- Register a domain name. I spent about $14 at godaddy to get “learningbox.org” for a year. Some names cost more than others.
- Set your name servers. Basically, you need to connect your domain name with the actual server where your stuff resides. Your server host will provide you the names of the servers you’re on, and you tell these names to the people you registered your domain name from. Sounds complicated, but it’s not.
- Install Moodle on your space. The Fantastico auto installer makes this a breeze. From the dashboard or control panel of your server space, find Fantastico, and tell it you want to install Moodle. It’ll do all the work for you, like setting up the necessary directories and databases. You can also install other stuff this way, like hosted wikis and blogs.
- Set up Moodle. It’s pretty much ready to go out of the box, and fairly intuitive. The help features are also useful, if you get stuck. I spent an inordinate amount of time picking a “look” for my site (from the available templates), but you may be less finicky.
- Teach.
There’s not much more to it than that. The only potential downside is that students aren’t added as participants automatically, the way they are with Sakai. Still, since students can register themselves with an “enrollment key” provided by me, the work is pretty minimal. Mostly I just had to manually remove students who dropped the course.
“Wait a minute,” you might say, “you payed out of your own pocket to run course management software?” Well, yes. And it was worth it. Running Moodle this quarter has only confirmed for me what a train wreck Sakai is. I figure what I saved in time and frustration more than made up the cost of it. I’d do it again, too, if SFSU didn’t already use Moodle (but they do, yay!).
* At the time, I avoided mentioning where I was, which was kind of difficult as it became clear to me that the local version of Sakai UCD uses is a part of the problem. I’ve decided I don’t care about anonymity anymore, if I ever really did.
loyalty oath June 7, 2008
Posted by KC in academia.Tags: academia, quaker, teaching
3 comments
Speaking of weirdly retrograde discourse, did you know that the state of California requires public university employees (including faculty) to sign a “loyalty oath?” Among the personnel paperwork I got from SFSU was a form asking me to put my John Hancock to this:
“I, ____________, do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States and the Constitution of the State of California against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the Constitution of the United States and the Constitution of the State of California; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties upon which I am about to enter.”
This, of course, is a hold over from the days of McCarthyism, a back-handed attempt to ferret out communists (“back-handed” because it doesn’t take the more direct route of asking you to say “I am not a communist”). I actually agonized for a while about whether to sign the thing, for a number of reasons:
- I’m a Quaker, and Quakers have historically objected to the taking of oaths. Our thinking is that there shouldn’t be two standards of truth–one for everyday discourse, and one for oath-taking. That is, you ought to tell the truth whether your hand is on a bible or not.
- Quakers also don’t believe in war. I’m not willing to sign on to “support and defend” one, let alone two constitutions if it involves violence against others.
- There’s something awfully absurd (and funny) about the idea of university faculty taking up arms to defend the constitution. Does that tweed sportcoat come in camouflage?
- Whoever wrote this oath probably didn’t really have armed professors in mind, but it’s likely that they imagined using it to force “loyal” faculty to name names. I’ve got a problem with that, too.
- Who decides who these “enemies” are? My sense is that the constitution could use some defending against some of the people currently occupying the White House.
- It’s essentially unenforceable.
This last, in my book, isn’t really a knock against it. In fact, it’s pretty much why I went ahead and signed the thing, despite these objections. That, and that parenthetical “affirm” (as opposed to “swear”) made me feel like I could sign my name without compromising too much. I also didn’t want to make a big fuss about it.
However, I learned just this week that the Cal State system has begun allowing employees to attach an addendum to the loyalty oath that registers these sorts of objections. A lecturer at CSUF, who had lost her job because she refused to sign (she was a Quaker, by the way), recently got her job back because of this. There’s an article in Inside Higher Ed about the case. So, even though I already signed mine, I’m going to try to get an addendum added to my personnel file, just so everyone’s clear about what I’m agreeing to.
Just to be clear: I do not object to the oath because I’ve got a problem with loyalty as such. At the end of the day, I’m comfortable saying (but not swearing) that I would support and defend (nonviolently) this country and its form of government, however imperfect. In the larger scheme of things, the fact that we’ve got such a process for negotiating the needs of conscience (however belated, in this case) suggests that this is a place worth preserving.
first stem cells, now ice cream June 5, 2008
Posted by KC in uncategorized.2 comments
This, I shit you not, is an excerpt from a report on “dignity” from the President’s Council on Bioethics:
Worst of all from this point of view are those more uncivilized forms of eating, like licking an ice cream cone–a catlike activity that has been made acceptable in informal America but that still offends those who know eating in public is offensive. … Eating on the street–even when undertaken, say, because one is between appointments and has no other time to eat–displays [a] lack of self-control: It beckons enslavement to the belly. … Lacking utensils for cutting and lifting to mouth, he will often be seen using his teeth for tearing off chewable portions, just like any animal. … This doglike feeding, if one must engage in it, ought to be kept from public view, where, even if we feel no shame, others are compelled to witness our shameful behavior.
Wow. I mean, wow. I could say how similar this is to a medieval sermon, or lament how these are the same people who advise the president (wrongly) on issues like stem cell research. However, I just think I’ll bask in the sublime absurdity of taking a moral stand on public licking (be careful how you spell that, by the way).
For a discussion of this weirdness, see Steven Pinker’s article in the New Republic.
