Faculty Academy 2008

Via Leslie, I watched this poignant video chronicling the last month of the paper. What I was thinking as I was watching it was that the value of good reporting has never been highlighted by anyone very well. CNN, MSNBC, FOX, the "news" that many people watch and pay attention to has never been about good reporting. So people don't know what they're missing. I don't think, as a couple of reporters said, that blogs are much to blame. In the grand scheme of things, people mostly don't get their news from blogs. It seems to me that the advent of 24 hour news channels, the Internet, and an administration who thought the news was like an annoying puppy conspired to create a bad environment for real news. So when the economy tanks, it seems like you're cutting out the fat when you cut out the news rather than throwing away the meat.

My own papers, the Philadelphia Inquirer and the Delaware County News, declared bankruptcy this week. I've been reading my news online for years and these papers have the crappiest web sites I've ever seen. I suspect that they lost quite a few readers that way. And quite frankly, my local paper doesn't seem to cover very important stories. Quite often, it reprints stories from the Inquirer and the local stories all bleed. There's very little coverage of local politics or really local anything that isn't crime related. I think one reason blogs have bcome popular is that people are craving something more than the "if it bleeds it leads" kind of stories. And blogs may not always be good journalism, but at least for the very best of them, their content is substantive. My impression is that the Rocky did have substantive content and was a good paper. It's sad that the community lost that. I'm sure it will be missed.


Final Edition from Matthew Roberts on Vimeo.

Image via Wikipedia

There's been a bit of discussion about this NY Times article about the humanities needing to prove they're worth the money in such trying economic times. I should say here and now that I have a degree in English from a SLAC, so I hope that gives me some credibility.

Tim Burke says some of what I've been thinking, that the humanities cannot justify themselves through an argument that the discipline is important because it is. Tim puts it this way:

I think the default reliance on disciplinary justifications for continued support are just as dead. Many humanistic disciplines have long privileged tautological arguments about the value of research and teaching: what they do is important because the discipline deems it important. A good project is a project which advances the work of the discipline. In particular, if you concede some new resource limitations or imperatives, I think the humanities mostly have to give up the disciplinary proposition that what we do is primarily discovery, that we research subjects and information which are unknown and turn them into knowledge.

What I was thinking mostly is that the humanities has become somewhat of a ghetto at many institutions as requirements for those courses have fallen away, either for practical or budgetary reasons. The NY Times article claims that the humanities have become an elitist course of study by people, I suppose, who can afford to major in Art History because daddy has the right connections to get them any job they want after college. I think part of the problem is that as faculty have specialized further and further and focused on "advancing the discipline" and, of course, themselves in the process, they no longer teach courses that would be appealing or appropriate for the physics and business majors out there. As the article alludes to, but doesn't directly say, a good course in ethics for all those Wall Street investors might have prevented some of our current financial fallout. So my thought is that the humanities need to come out of their elite or ghettoized (whatever your point of view is) and start infusing themselves into many other disciplines. There need to be courses, perhaps, that are cross-disciplinary. And I think institutions need to value to work of creating those courses and perhaps find a way to slow down the "creation of knowledge" aspect of humanities work and encourage more thoughtful teaching.

Some of the interviewees in the article imply that what needs to happen is a kind of "back to basics" approach, a return to the "great works," etc. I actually think just the opposite, that we need to broaden what we mean by the humanities and what humanistic courses encompass. Certainly many of the old lessons apply, but I think we need to try to apply them more directly, to have the conversation, for example, about our online identities and what it means to be human in cyberspace as well as meatspace.

I personally value my humanities background and I cast my net wide when I was in school, taking econ classes, business classes, physics, and computer science in addition to the writing and literature classes I "needed" for my major. Too often, however, the econ majors don't venture into a literature class and that's especially true at larger schools. We need to find a way to encourage econ majors to venture into more humanities classes by making them more obviously applicable (I can imagine, for example, a course that studies novels from the Great Depression or whose main characters are investment bankers) or to teach econ humanistically (easier with econ maybe than with physics).

The above video was one of two videos we showed near the beginning of our presentation for Northern Voice. Nancy White started off by having everyone draw pictures together. The idea was to have them feel a little uncomfortable working together. I did get upset with Barbara for making a squiggle where I didn't want one. :) The videos were meant to explore the discomfort of navigating digital and physical spaces and to explore the discomfort one might feel in doing that, or in Barbara's case, what her clients (citizens of small rural towns) feel.

We debriefed quite a bit afterward, and I'm still thinking about it. What Nancy was interested was the space between the different spaces we might occupy--virtual, digital, global, local. Whether we feel comfortable or not with whatever group, the movement, the transition from one to another is often quite difficult. Many of us are experiencing that transition today (or yesterday) by moving from the intense mostly like-minded environment of Northern Voice to our work and home spaces. For me, this transition was made all the more unsettling thanks to missed flights that led to my traveling all night. Really, it seems to me that it is this in between state that we occupy most of the time, a strange space where we can conceive of ourselves in different spaces and feel fragmented and whole at the same time. I'd like to say that for me this is when I'm at home, but that's not entirely true. I think I have this feeling that only part of myself appears in any given space. The idea of multiple identities is nothing new, of course, but living it so vividly by having these digital persona running around feels somehow disruptive.

I'm not sure where I'm going with this, except to say that it's good when your own presentation makes you think. One of the things I said in the presentation was how difficult I was finding it to move as freely in the physical world I have access to as the virtual ones. The people I see at school and on the street (aside from my students) don't even know about the virtual spaces I live in much less use them. I can't have the flow I have with the people I knew online and then met this weekend or the ones I met this weekend and am now reading their blogs or following them on Twitter. When I see them again, it's not quite like we haven't seen each other in a while. We have some sense of each other's lives in between. So how do I build relationships with people offline and maintain them without technology? Seriously. That's my big question. The local friends I do, we follow each other via Twitter, keep in touch via email and blogs, and arrange the occasional drinking fest at someone's house or local bar. But where I'm stumbling is trying to make connections not just for friendship but to effect change. Now that the election is over, it's the little things we need to work on--school board budgets, PTA meetings, land development--that really aren't so little and my impression is that much of the connecting for that happens elsewhere, not online, but in the library and the coffee shop and at the grocery store. I just need to get my ass out of the chair and go to those places and "follow" the right people.

What about you? What are your in between spaces like? How to you maintain physical connections with or without technology?

This tale is brought to you by Bluehost, or rather the lack thereof. My account was down yesterday for about 12 hours. I have no illusions that anybody even noticed, but for me it was frustrating because I had a post brewing and I couldn’t write it. Now why couldn’t I write it and post it later? I’m using Windows Live Writer right? Well no because I’m using the Mac side of my MacBook Pro much more lately and there’s no WLW on this side of the grass. I’ll have a post about the Mac vs. PC thing soon I’m sure. (Yes, I know there is a thing called a text editor, but I’m spoiled you know).

Now it may have been a good thing I didn’t post yesterday because it was going to be a rant about how some people are essentially blaming the less well off for the current economic crisis. I’m talking about, among others, that horse’s ass Rick Santelli and Phil “nation of whiners” Gramm. Again, maybe it’s just as well because I can move on now and still get to call Rick Santelli a horse’s ass. Twice!

So just to prove John Lennon’s posit that life is what’s happening when you’re making other plans, I was off doing something completely different than writing a political rant. I was seeing what people were saying about web hosting companies. I was able to listen in on other conversations (and rants) about their web host. Wondering whether the grass was greener, I was seeing that it wasn’t necessarily. How was I listening in on all this? With TweetDeck. If you don’t know what TweetDeck is, it is an Adobe Air application that gives a different view of the Twitter conversation. As I’ve mentioned before, TweetDeck allows you to track multiple conversation with its built in search feature and view it in a separate column that you can track, just like you track what your friends are saying.

As the screenshot above illustrates, I am able to see anyone on Twitter talk about either Bluehost, or another company I am considering, MediaTemple. I have seen both kinds of comments from “I love Bluehost” and “I love MediaTemple” to the more likely “Bluehost/MediaTemple is teh suck” - knowing full well that negative comments will more likely appear on Twitter. Mine did.

What did I learn from the TweetDeck comparison? Ok, so go figure, the grass isn’t always greener. Mentioned also in these conversations was a service called Mosso, that had largely positive reviews. Also, it comes as no surprise that Mosso is more expensive than either Bluehost or MediaTemple. So here’s a summary of what I learned:

• Inexpensive web hosting companies have down-time
• You (for the most part) get what you pay for
• People like to vent/complain/rant
• It’s good to know other people (even those I don’t know) are having similar issues

Thanks TweetDeck, I sure do love you. I think I’ll go tweet that. There.