Scholarly Life of a Committed Technofile » Travel

C&W 2007: Serendipity

rrodrigo — Mon, 04 Jun 2007 18:07:04 +0000

I had a shock last Wednesday (well…a couple weeks ago now) while boarding the plane to Detroit for the computers and writing conference–to my surprise my colleague and his wife (also a good friend) were sitting across the aisle from me. They were headed off to a conference about Arab American Writers.
Look at the pamphlet in the lower right hand corner of the picture…it was for their conference, and another colleague and I found it at a local restaurant in Detroit. How weird! I guess we can all start singing “It’s a small world after all.”

C&W 2007: Power of Adjectivals

rrodrigo — Mon, 04 Jun 2007 12:25:49 +0000

One of the nights that we were running around Detroit a colleague kept telling us stories about her former boyfriends. There was the boyfriend with the short arms. The boyfriend during graduate school. The boyfriend with the irritating mother who wanted to teach her to cook. ETC… And of course, the focus here is on the storytelling. We all got good laughs about these former boyfriend stories and what are colleague learned about herself in the process. Finally, at the end of the night, our colleague made a slip. She mentioned something that pulled two of the stories together. Another colleague and I caught on quickly and started to unravel the web of stories. Lo and behold, the stories were all of the same guy! All evening we had been imagining that our colleague has had this wonderful mish-mash of relationship experiences (which indeed, she has) with a variety of individuals (nah…we didn’t think she was a hussy, not us!).

I wish my students had been there to participate in this event. It was a wonderful lesson on the power of adjectivals. All of the different detailed descriptors about the noun “boyfriend” made it appear that there were many more boyfriends in play. Buy splitting up the telling of the adjectivals we slowly built a very multi-faceted understanding of this individual.

Enough of being a word/communication geek!

C&W 2007: Open Source Workshop

rrodrigo — Mon, 04 Jun 2007 11:41:32 +0000

Let’s just start with WOW! The folks who organized this workshop did a great job of providing resources, providing quick introductions and leaving time for play. As those of you who occasionally swing by and read my blog know, both my dissertation research as well as other assessment data from workshops I have facilitated indicates, faculty committed to technology generally just need more scheduled play time to keep up with technology. I felt completely at home with my laptop open, working stuff from this workshop, other materials, and asking questions along the way. Participating in this workshop has helped me stick to my “more open source” commitment.” Mini-me is only running open office. I’m trying to only use open office at home. I’m slowly playing with the other cool stuff they demoed (see the second link below). I’m very excited about them showing the portable apps stuff as well. I’m looking forward to demoing portable apps with a group of students who do not own their own computers.

The Wacky World of Bathrooms

rrodrigo — Fri, 25 May 2007 16:18:02 +0000

About five years ago, a couple of my friends/colleagues and realized that we all liked to keep track of funky bathrooms. Since then, when we find a funky bathroom we generally try to bring it to one another’s attention. This past week when I was in Detroit at Computers & Writing I was with one of my “funky bathroom” friends. Without knowing that the Cass Cafe was one of the places highly suggested by a colleague who went to school in Detroit, we ended up there late Wednesday night (it was one of the few places still serving food!). We had great food, nice classes of wine, and a wonderful laugh over the bathroom.

The other stall had a loop and hook setup that looked like it could hold together a truck and trailor hitching. For more pics from the Cass Cafe, and one of its “tame” pieces of art, check out my flickr site.

Sandbox: Adaptive Blue (& Greasemonkey)

rrodrigo — Fri, 06 Apr 2007 18:06:56 +0000

Now that I’ve understood what Greasemonkey does for about two weeks, I’m still trying to find scripts and play with it. This Adaptive Blue seems like another page adapter.

Greasemonkey
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/748
Greasemonkey is one of the many wonderful Firefox addons. Once you load Greasemonkey on your browser you get a little monkey face in the lower right hand corner of the browser page. Once Greasemonkey is loaded, you can go load a bunch of java userscripts. The java scripts start adapting webpages. So far I’ve been heavily adapting my gmail interface. Of course there is a script to take out advertisements, but I also import my calendar, move the user window around, etc. However there are two things I know of (and actually Brian Ballentine at Computer Connections, at CCCCs this year) already mentioned it:

take advertisments out of Blogger (if you are using that as a blogging tool)–self explantory as being useful
have the WorldCAT lookup link show at an Amazon page. When you look up a book at Amazon and link on the particular page for the book, the little WorldCAT (world catalog) icon will show up on the page. You can then click on that link and the WorldCAT will show you what local libraries have that book in their holdings. How cool is that while teaching a research course?

There is one WebCT script, and two for BlackBoard. I can imagine asking tech people on my campus to write a script or two…if I knew what I wanted/needed.
Adaptive Blue
http://www.adaptiveblue.com/index.html
(found link from: http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/makeuseof-extra-43-web-goodies-and-tips/)
I’m not quite sure how Adaptive Blue adapts yet. I’ll continue to play with it over the next week or two and blog again. The nice thing about this tool is that I can just right click on every page and see how/what/why it is going to adapt. I’m happy that it is giving options too bookmark. But it also give options to Bluemark and Bluelink. Humm…

Where’s the Beef?

rrodrigo — Tue, 03 Apr 2007 10:02:26 +0000

I’m sure by this point you are probably asking yourself about the “real” reason I went to CCCCs, to learn from my colleagues. Or in other words, “Shelley, did you go to any panels?” Yes, yes I did. However, I’m not going to be blogging about the panels in my blog. Instead, I’m going to be writing reviews for the annual 4Cs Review. So if you really want to know what I learned while at CCCCs, check out Kairos sometime around/after May 15th.

Social Bookmarking, my dead horse

rrodrigo — Tue, 03 Apr 2007 09:02:36 +0000

(beware…my frustration leads to the blatantly horrible mixing of metaphors)

I’m beginning to feel like my social bookmarking crusade is turning into the continued beating of a dead horse who sure as hell doesn’t want to drink the damn water. I was a huge fan of Furl for years. And as I got more interested in the “social” aspects of bookmarking, I’ve become a devote delicious user. And it seems like I’m always finding new and cool things (firefox plugins, greasemonkey scripts, etc.) that work with delicious. So after being rejected for the main line up of presentations at CCCCs, I decide to apply to present at the Computer Connection. Since I firmly believe that all scholars and students should have a social bookmarking account, I figured I’d try to spread the word to my rhet/comp brethren.

I copied Educause’s “7 things” series and made my handout. My audience…the other people from my session, and one person who stayed from the panel before. How am I supposed to convert the masses if they won’t come? At home I’ve been doing more general “web2.0” workshops, advertising blogs and wikis, and smacking the workshop participants over the head with social bookmarking. Maybe I’ll have to do that with my rhet/comp colleagues as well.

This does make me realize that the question for my multi-modal blogging at Computers & Writing 2007 http://englishweb.clas.wayne.edu/~cw07/cw07/ will be about social bookmarking.

I couldn’t figure out how to embed the PollDaddy Poll in the blog entry…so do click on “Take Our Poll”…

Create Polls – Take Our Poll

Multi-Modal Conference Reporting

rrodrigo — Tue, 03 Apr 2007 08:39:41 +0000

Well…I had good intentions. I got some pictures (notice, however, I’m not alone in cccc07 pics). Stacey got one video up to YouTube. But I didn’t do any audio recording. And that is what my Podcasting FPLC really wanted me to do! I think Duku’s speech during the opening session helped me to understand why I failed; I didn’t have focus! Duku talked about having a set group of questions she asked different CCCCs attendees last year in Chicago. Ahhh Haaa! A focused question, or questions, would help. And then I realized I also hadn’t prepared for dealing with permissions.

Therefore, I have a plan! (Don’t I always, the problem is I have too many of the damn things.) I’m going to pick a single question for each conference I attend. I can then have a focus point to ask people about. I will also come prepared with a clip board and permission slips that will have the whole set of audio, video, picture, etc. permission options. We’ll see how this plays out this summer…I’ve got a handful of conferences I’m attending.

The XY chromosomes have the golf course, we have…

rrodrigo — Tue, 03 Apr 2007 08:21:24 +0000

…Sephora!

Susan, Deb and I made our second annual CCCCs Sephora trip. Honestly, it’s just an excuse to leave the conference hotel, see the city a bit, and buy some lip gloss. We missed Cheryl and look forward to her coming with us again while at NCTE this fall (who knows, maybe we’ll hit shoes, colored martinis and champagne as well).

We went to the 5^th Avenue Sephora. Really, the only store we went into was Sephora. I swear! What blew my mind away was that there was an eye brow salon on the second floor of the store. All they did was eyebrows! Maybe next year I’ll check in advance and make appointments for us?!

As usual, I was overwhelmed by all the girlie products (if you don’t know, I generally don’t wear make-up). However, I found a few lip glosses I liked and called it good. Knowing we would be going, Susan gave me a Sephora gift card. That did help in deciding I might actually pay $15 or more for a tube of lip gloss.

And yes, these trips are also about “golf course talk.” We did do the networking thin–Deb is the editor of CCCs.

Eating and Ethics

rrodrigo — Tue, 03 Apr 2007 08:09:16 +0000

I hope my colleague Richard doesn’t read this entry; he would be very angry!

Susan and I have giggled about how we barely have to spend any money on food at CCCCs. Between the various breakfasts we pay to attend (WPA, see later post & TYCA, oops, slept in this year) and the Textbook Company parties in the evenings, meals are pretty covered. So this year was the typical line up, with conflicting parties so that you can’t possibly attend them all. But I made it to Bedford/St. Martin’s party at the Tavern on the Green. WOW…that place was amazing. And then I felt so sophisticated when I came home and continued reading through my WitchBlade compendium (b-day gift!!!) and a scene took place at the Tavern. I also drank a few too many mohitos at Allyn & Bacon/Longman’s party at the Havana place (eek…forgetting the name, hopefully someone will respond and correct me). The coconut shrimp were divine. And this year I missed McGraw Hill’s annual Rock’n’Roll party because I was too busy hanging out in the Hilton’s bar, and then riding the subway with Dale to try to catch the live sing-a-long of the Buffy Musical episode. We were bummed, they were sold out when we got there.

But back to the title, ethics and eating. So, the textbook industry pays for some of my food while in NYC. In other words, those students buying the books we require of them…paid for our dinners. And folks, these parties are huge, hundreds of people, don’t think that I’m somehow in the “in” crowd. These parties must cost these companies thousands of dollars. With the increasing hub-bub about textbook prices, especially in The Chronicle and Inside Higher Ed, should we be rethinking these practices (and expectations)? But the Rhet/Comp field is not the only one doing this; last year at the annual nmc summer conference, we had two hum-dinger of parties thrown by Apple and Adobe. Adobe rented out the Rock’n’Roll Hall of Fame!