Steven D. Krause's Official Blog

This is it for this site, folks-- a new year, a new blog, and time to update the links. My new and improved (sorta) blog space is at http://krause.emich.edu/blog, which is actually my eMac office computer which I also use a miniserver of sorts. Essentially, this is an experiment in running Movable Type on a Mac with OS 10.3. We'll see how it goes.

Anyway, see you there!

Through the Humanist listserv, I came across IEEE Annals of the History of Computing. I've just skimmed through it a bit, but it seems to have a lot of kind of cool and interesting articles in it. Interesting stuff.

'Twas the morning before Christmas, and in my parents' house in Iowa, I was awoken by the sound of tiny pre-schooler feet running around downstairs at 5:30 in the morning. Oh well, so it gives me a chance to use my parents' computer, which has a cable modem connection, to do a little "Writing for the World Wide Web" surfing.

Two interesting links:

* http://www.weblogg-ed.com/2003/12/22#a1262 This link from the education-themed "Weblogg-ed" about how blogging does or doesn't work for students in classrooms. It is a post that raises a lot of good questions, has a lot of good links, and ties into an article I have under consideration right now at a publication out there in computer and composition-land.

* http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20031222.html This link is from Jakob Nielsen's useit.com site and it lists what he sees as the "top 10 mistakes" of 2003. I have sort of mixed feelings about Nielsen's work. On the one hand, I think he is a lot of good ideas about making web sites more readable and usable. On the other hand, his web sites seems kind of boring to me.

For a couple years now, I've been subscribed to The Humanist Discussion Group, which isn't a "free-for-all" email list discussion common in the composition community, but rather, it is a filtered forum that is as much about announcements of various sorts than it is about discussion. I don't follow more than half of what is posted there, but what I do find interesting I find very interesting.

In any event, the forum's editor, Willard McCarty of King's College in London, posted a fairly personal message today about the Winter Solstice, which is today, and also the simultaneously "private" and "public" nature of the scholarly life. You should sign up to the list and read the whole thing. As a computers and writing person, I was most struck by this part of it:

Some here will remember when we were told that computers would lead to the massive isolation of individuals from each other, everyone in front of a screen, no one face-to-face. Then people began to wonder why computer labs were so popular among those who had their own machines. Now people like Terry Winograd are telling us not only that computers are about communicating rather than alphanumeric crunching but that the metaphor of the "interface" (that which is between a person and his or her machine) is all wrong, that it should be replaced by another, the "habitat" ("From Computing Machinery to Interaction Design", in Peter Denning and Robert Metcalfe, eds., Beyond Calculation: The Next Fifty Years of Computing, Springer-Verlag, 1997, 149-162, online at http://hci.stanford.edu/winograd/acm97.html). I suppose one could argue in the manner of Geoffrey Nunberg that our party-animal nature, long constricted by professional modes of communication, is now allowed its rampant freedom -- that although we were highly social lone scholars before, now we are even more so.

Amen to that. Lights in the darkness.

I posted my last set of grades this evening for the Fall term and I now have the sweet taste of completion on my tongue. At least for a short while. We start up again with classes here at EMU on January 5, far too short of a break if you ask me. Of course, the good news is we are done with the Winter 2004 semester before the end of April.

My goals over the holiday break (besides giving and receiving Christmas day gifties and traveling to Iowa to see family) are to get my classes for Winter prepared and to potentially figure out how to use movable Type for this blog space. I've started to figure it out for my unofficial blog space, but I would like to run this blog on the same server that I run my home page on, which is a Mac running OS 10.3, and there are some kinks to work out first.

Anyway, I will briefly bask in the glow of my free time...

The EMU board of regents commissioned an audit of the controversial presidential house project at EMU, and the results are in. You can read all about it in the Ann Arbor News and other recent stories about the house by visiting the web site http://www.mlive.com/aanews/special/university_house/. The story reports that the audit found that there wasn't anything illegal about the way that the house was paid for and built, and Kirkpatrick and Incarnati (the chair of the board of regents) are more or less using this as a reason to say that this should end the discussion.

Hardly. In my mind, the issue was never the legality of how the house was being built-- I mean, I didn't think that Kirkpatrick et al took kickbacks or whatever. Though it is worth noting that the audit apparently makes it clear that there were some notable "irregularities" about how funds were shifted around different university accounts to pay for things like the landscaping.

No, I think that the issue is the same as it was a couple of years ago: the President's house, the building of which Kirkpatrick put into motion the minute he came to campus four years ago, is excessive, especially in light of the budget cuts that have hit EMU and other public universities in recent years. While the faculty ranks shrink, EMU is hiring more administrators and more part-time teachers. While the majority of EMU students and faculty have to work in inadequate and unpleasant academic buildings, the President and Mrs. Kirkpatrick live in a 10,000 square foot palace. Is it any wonder why morale around campus is not exactly at an all-time high?

My department head came to my name on the "Faculty who Haven't Gone to Commencement Recently to Represent the Department" list and told me it was my turn this winter. Actually, it really is about time-- I've been here five years and this is the first ceremony I've attended-- and when all is said and done, it was kind of fun. I got to dress up in a funny academic costume (just a rental and not one of the fancy ones that some folks have), I got to listen to an okay speaker (Kevin Klose, who runs NPR), and I got to see the students right as they came down the ramp after getting their diplomas. It was interesting, because you could really see in some of their eyes the extent to which it was a defining moment in their lives. Or not.

Best story of the afternoon: there was a guy who graduated this term who was 83 years old. He actually started college in the late 30s, and had been taking classes at night at EMU since the late 60s.

Out of the 1,000 or so graduates, I only recognized two students of mine. There must have been more than that, and I am sure there are some students who graduated but who didn't go to commencement. Well, if you were there and I didn't see you, congrats; and if you weren't there and you are about to graduate, good luck to you, too.