Danny Rubin, guest writing at Lifehacker, makes my point very well. I think the days of traditional academic writing are over. Maybe they have been for a long time, yet we academics seem to be blind to the fact.

OK, let me step back for a moment. As you know, I’m a displaced English professor, now teaching in what is essentially a media studies program. In my former life, I often taught first-year composition: a course that supposedly taught students the writing skills they needed for college. The main focus of the course was the college essay. Now, freshmen usually had no trouble with the form of the essay; they just struggled with the content. Grammar issues aside — these would usually work themselves out during the term — the main focus would be composing an argument in a logical way. This fact usually separates the high-school essay from the college one: the amount of analysis devoted to an argument.

Conventional approaches to teaching more nuanced and critical inquiry usually mean emphasizing word minimums. For example, see my assignment for The Belief Essay. Notice that it asks for 1000 words. Now, I don’t emphasize this number in the assignment, but it does suggest that the essay will not be complete unless it somehow makes it to at least 1000 words. This emphasis on word minimums is a symptom of the problem, particularly in disciplines that are not English.

Yet, when my colleagues and I rewrote our CIT curriculum, several of them insisted on making “writing-intensive” courses a focus of the program. I agree with the premise: our program has a foundation in the liberal arts, and writing is integral to the development of thoughtful and articulate citizenry. However, “writing intensive” is not defined anywhere in the catalog that I can see. I think we academics have a tacit understanding of what it means (especially since all the courses listed in this section are cultural studies classes): make the students write. A lot. What they be writing intensively? Essays. Again, maybe this is still appropriate for English programs — particularly those that emphasize graduate school — but for a degree in New Media and Communications, I think we’re doing the students a disservice, especially if we pretend that our degree is, like our college’s mission statement says, preparing “students to succeed in a technology-rich, information-driven global economy while developing important life and citizenship skills through a solid foundation in the liberal arts.”

One of the traits of language is that it’s alive — it changes to meet the needs of the culture. As a Ph.D. in English Literature, I appreciate all literary idioms, from Pope’s rapier-like heroic couplets, to Faulkner’s multi-page sentences. One of the lessons that I take from these masters is a rhetorical one: language must fit the circumstance. What are our students writing today in an age of convergence and multitasking? It’s not the traditional essay, especially in a media studies program.

Now don’t misunderstand me. Like the novel, I don’t think the college essay is going away. In fact, it’s still a pretty darn good container for evaluating student understanding of complex subject matter. My exams always include essays. Yet, I have often wondered why I assign so many essays: I don’t like to read them, and I know students don’t like to write them.

With this in mind, I have begun approaching writing in a different way, even in my humanities courses. Instead of word minimums, I now assign word maximums. It’s a completely different skill: communicate complex thoughts with fewer words. Students quickly learn that they cannot waste time with useless bits of information that they needed to pad their prose when writing the traditional college essay. Instead, they need to cut away the fat to get to the lean meat underneath. Many students struggle with this type of writing, but I think it serves them better today than the multi-page essay of yore.

This spring in my Senior Seminar in New Media, I tried this approach. Instead of essays, I had the students contribute to Big Jelly – an exercise that reflects the real world for this major. They did not turn in writing and get a grade on it; instead, they submitted their posts which were either accepted or rejected. If the latter, they could revise and submit again. Only contributions that that were clear and concise were posted. I quickly learned that this type of writing was totally new to these seniors. Even those who had been trained to be master essayists struggled with this new approach, which I call writing for digital media. Most learned to adapt by the semester’s end. However, several did not. It was a frustrating exercise for many of them, a fact that likely tarnished my evacuations.

My conclusion: our students — those that we intend to get careers as media professionals — need to learn this type of writing well before their senior year. In fact, our program should emphasize it. Yes, keep the essay around, but begin to wean them of it so that by the time they are seniors, they are ready to write for digital media, not the college classroom.

This course satisfies a core requirement, but it hasn’t been offered in a long time — if ever. Unfortunately, it may not make. Hopefully, the poster I have made above will help. Tell your friends.

Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines, sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.” —Mark Twain

I have been invited to talk about study abroad at the Cultural Journeys undergraduate conference. I’ll be speaking after three students who have actually participated in study abroad programs, so I wonder just how much I’ll add to the conversation. Students tend to be more convincing than faculty in these matters.

I truly believe that study abroad — and travel in general — makes us better people. I know that for me, the two times I have taught in London have been two of the best experiences of my professional and personal life. They have made me a better teacher and a better person. I’m pretty sure that most people would benefit from getting the heck out of Georgia for a summer. But how to convince them?

I decided to use music and images to convey my enthusiasm. So, I put together a video of my photography from my 2009 and 2011 travels, along with some words of wisdom about travel from others more eloquent than I. Check out my video above.

Also, in thinking about this a bit more, I found two useful resources: “Why Study Abroad?” and “Study Abroad Myths and Misconceptions.”

We Americans spend so much of our lives constructing ever-shrinking bubbles that define us and isolate us. With money as the ultimate pursuit, all of our decisions are in many ways determined: how to make the most; how to protect it; how to pass it on and to whom. It often seems that chasing the American Dream closes us off to opportunities we would otherwise engage, like foreign travel. Most of my students here in central Georgia were born here and they will die here, without ever traveling far from the lives they have built. This is not necessarily a criticism — we all need our comfort zones — but without getting outside the bubble, it becomes smaller and it in turn makes us smaller. New experiences takes risk, and that’s the very opposite of comfort and security.

Interestingly, more American women take advantage of study abroad programs than men do. Some of the conclusions are interesting.

Yes, travel is a risk. Yes, it can be expensive. However, this is what we pursue money for. If money can’t help us expand our lives in meaningful ways, what good is it? Of all the things to invest in, travel and self-discovery should be among the most important.

Don’t live in fear and obeisance: stand up, get educated, and live your life.

Like many of the great modernists, Kafka’s novel resists a unified reading. No explanation can consider every angle, and no rational application truly gets it. In fact, this might be Kafka’s posthumous joke on his readers: like his characters — especially Josef K. — we grapple with the surreality and irrationally of his text and try to incorporate it into our reality based on the measured reason that literary studies emphasizes — the more we try to make sense out of the senselessness — the more Kafka’s text eludes us. This is Kafka’s black sense of humor — not something that inspires laughter, but sighs and moans.

The central action of the novel is precipitated by Josef K.’s arrest: “Someone must have slandered Josef K., for one morning, without having done anything wrong, he was arrested” (3). The first sentence of the novel is informative. First, it locates the cause of K.’s arrest externally, providing him something to investigate — something to do in order to exculpate himself, seek justice, and reestablish order. Next, “one morning” suggests the randomness of his arrest — though later we learn that it’s K.’s thirtieth birthday, perhaps a time to take account of life. Further emphasizing the randomness of the event is the phrase “without having done anything wrong” — placing reason and guilt well to the side. K.’s arrest becomes the defining metaphor for the novel and represents the central existential crisis that he grapples with throughout.

I think that K.’s largest problem is one that many of us struggle with in our lives: i.e., a solipsism that colors our perspectives of reality and, more importantly, our relationships with others. K. is a jerk. He treats other people like crap, particularly those whom he deems as inferior or irrelevant to his trial. If, say in the case of Block the merchant, K. believes that the person can be useful, he will change his attitude and become almost affectionate. This is especially true with the women, like Leni. Yet, as his name implies, Block — like the women K. desires — only ends up distracting K. from what he should be doing.

And what is that? What should K. be doing? This is a specific question that he never seems to ask himself, even though the inspector in the first chapter gives him a clue: “think less about us and what’s going to happen to you, and instead think more about yourself” (14). These external factors “us” and “what’s going to happen” cannot be controlled or influenced by anything K. does. In fact, even if it’s not obvious to K. at this point, the “what’s going to happen” is always the same: he is going to die. There is nothing that he or the Law can do about that fact. However, K. does have a choice to do something about how he lives. Tragically, this is something he never gets. Like the man who tries to get access to the Law in the prison chaplain’s parable, K. will die having made no progress toward a greater understanding. This fact is bad enough, but add to it K.’s unwillingness or inability to seize the day makes his death all the more meaningless.

After his arrest, K.’s subsequent journey is nightmarish. His quest to access the inner workings of the Law elude him more as he seems to garner insights. K. becomes obsessed with the cause of the disease, so it consumes him. At the risk of reducing this intricate novel to what might be a simplistic interpretation, K.’s arrest is like a cancer diagnosis. His trial begins immediately: does he attack the disease directly or ignore it and live life to the fullest? He takes the former approach. What would we do? The trial becomes life after the existential moment of crisis — after the arrest. What do we do with our remaining days to combat the absurdity of death and bring meaning to our short lives?

As K. dies, his killer states: “Like a dog!” (231). With additional reflection, this final judgement is not really a commentary about how K. dies, but how he lived. Two chapters before, K. looks on Block the merchant with contempt. K. had come to his lawyer’s house to dismiss his attorney. In an effort to dissuade him, the lawyer calls in the pathetic Block. As K. watches almost pruriently, the lawyer degrades the merchant. K. comes to the conclusion “that the client finally forgot the entire world, desiring only to trudge along this mistaken path to the end of his trial. He was no longer a client, he was the lawyer’s dog” (195). Like a domesticated dog, Block became a prisoner of the rules imposed upon him by a master. K. superciliously believes that he is above this fate, and proves his point by taking responsibility for his own trial. However, K.’s own arrogance blinds him to the fact that he, too, is a product of society’s own laws, like decorum, career, and social standing. In a way, K. might be even more pathetic and deserving of his fate than Block. After all, Block’s trial has been going on for five years, while K.’s is over in exactly one.

K. continues — till the very end — to look for answers beyond himself — to explain the “what’s going to happen” rather than thinking more about himself. This seems to be the modern condition in The Trial: our civilization has given us so much, but ultimately we are by ourselves in the end. In his last moments, K. still looks for redemption from above while he is put down like a dog.

Straight to the point. I called my first section “The Art of Science” and positioned it as a study of postmodern culture in general and digital culture in particular. I think it worked pretty well, so I will borrow some ideas from that course for my new offering: “Digital Humanities.”

I think there’s a misperception of the digital humanities even among those who profess to know what it is, so opines Stanley Fish. I tend to agree with him. To many, it seems to be a catch-all that unfortunately catches nothing. If you Google “digital humanities,” the first hit is from the venerable Wikipedia that defines it as: “The digital humanities is an area of research, teaching, and creation concerned with the intersection of computing and the disciplines of the humanities.” This is about as enlightening as the catalog description of HUMN 2151 above.

This course will look at defining “digital humanities” and examining both primary and secondary texts that seem to relate. More on this as my syllabus develops.

My standard introduction to modernism spans several class periods, so I had to narrow it to about 20 minutes. I prepared a few slides that I didn’t get to show because of the classroom’s equipment, so Dr. Braun asked if I would post them. They are above.

It’s official. When my 10-month contract expires in June, I will no longer be the NMAC Coordinator for the Department of Media, Culture & the Arts. Here’s how the MCA Chair put it in an email to the faculty:

This was a bittersweet decision for me. I have contributed greatly to the renewal of the New Media and Communications program. When I first came to the position, the program was still called Communication & Information Technology, or CIT. It was developed about ten years earlier by a completely different faculty with different areas of expertise — and when considering technology, it was a different world. While it served a changing Humanities Division for that time, the curriculum was beginning to show its age. It needed to be revised and updated to better fit the college’s mission and the faculty’s interests and expertise.

A revision of the curriculum was the first order of business, and we didn’t have much time. Based on my experience teaching in the CIT Program and with a vision for its future, I wrote the first draft of the new, still unnamed curriculum. After many discussions and revisions, the faculty and I came up with a strong new program that removed the courses that were no longer germane, changed many of the requirements and focus, and made the whole curriculum more flexible for the students.

We ended up concentrating on three areas: theory, production, and cultural studies. We wanted our students to have strong theoretical foundations, a solid praxis in the digital media of the day, and heavy doses of writing-intensive cultural studies to produce well rounded graduates and stellar media professionals. The final curriculum is not perfect, nor does it much resemble my original draft, but it is currently a good program. In fact, at the end of my tenure as coordinator, we’ll be graduating about twenty students — a steady increase over previous graduation rates.

As part of the new curriculum, I proposed and implemented a new capstone requirement: rather than a research paper, students would construct portfolios that transitioned them from students to professionals. Our first group of NMAC seniors are completing their portfolios this semester. I also helped develop NMAC 3145 Digital Media Studio that students take early in their junior year to introduce them to the software that they will be using throughout their studies in the program. The course was originally called Technology and the Creative Artist which looked at the influence of digital technologies on cultural production. It still has that foundation, but its emphasis is now on studio work.

My first consideration and responsibility as NMAC Coordinator was for the students. I felt it was necessary to get to know all of the NMAC students — at least as they became seniors. However, most of the students knew me by that time, anyway, having had me for a course or two. I think my responsibilities as coordinator made me a better teacher. I had to be more approachable as an administrator, so it made me even more conscious of my professional persona. One issue that I have struggled with my whole teaching career is students’ perception of me. Many find me intimidating, so I tried to make myself extra approachable in the classroom especially. I think it has worked. I’ve developed many excellent relationships as coordinator.

Some Accomplishments as the NMAC Coordinator

• Led the curriculum revisions in one semester, Fall 2010
• Rewrote NMAC 4483 and NMAC 3145, Fall 2010
• Advised during registration, pre-registration, and throughout the semester
• Taught NMAC 4460 and NMAC 4483 regularly
• Supervised four student internships
• Organized and hosted two NMAC Roundups
• Created two posters and a brochure for recruitment
• Advised the refit of our Mac Lab/Classroom: hardware, software, and room organization
• Hired and supervised the Mac Lab Assistant
• Acted as System Administrator of the department server, performing one major system software upgrade
• Acted as Webmaster of the departmental Web site, performing several redesigns and updates
• Supported server users: MCA, the Honors Program, and the English Department
• Ran a Moodle server for several MCA and English faculty
• Served as Chair for the Web site committee, 2011-2012
• Designed the advising rubrics for the NMAC program
• Wrote assessment reports
• Performed graduation audits

Thanks to all of those who supported me during my time as the NMAC Coordinator, especially the students and my colleagues.

So, I’m on to it: to the next phase of my professional career. More on that to come.

Ever since iBooks came out with the iPad, I have wanted to publish some of my own content. Yet, as anyone who has ever tried can attest, this is not easy. Creating EPUBs is just awkward and inconvenient. Think of it as writing a web page before WISWYG editors, or composing an essay on a pre-GUI word processor.

The recent release of Pages allows a document to be exported as an EPUB, but then to actually see it, a transfer to the iPad is necessary. In theory, this should be easy, but iTunes is such a piece of junk, that nothing like this is ever easy. (Say, Apple, when are you gonna fix this obsolete piece of bloatware anyway?) So, until the release of iBook Author, writing electronic books was not exactly convenient or easy.

Supposedly, iBooks Author is changing all of that. Roger Rosner’s demo was way cool — the video above gives you a bit of a look. The keynote emphasizes textbooks, but the potential for any kind of electronic publication is there. For example, I’ve started publishing literary content on LitMUSE, but wouldn’t delivery on the iPad be so much better, especially since you can annotate it and take it with you even without a network connection? Yes, maybe this is one more nail in the Web’s coffin. Plus, the ability to add multimedia content — e.g., Eliot reading The Waste Land, excerpts from a documentary on Homer, or photos I recently took in Greece — would boost it to the next level — especially in a Humanities class. I already have a ton of original content.

And speaking of the end of the Web, perhaps LitMUSE’s days as a course Web site are numbered in the light of the new iTunes U. It provides a slick way to deliver all sorts of content in a convenient format. They did not demo the course construction during the keynote, but Apple’s web site makes it look pretty easy. I know I would be perfect for this. Maybe this will be LitMUSE 2.0?

I already have ideas for my next semester’s classes, and I can’t wait to get started. I predict this is the beginning of a whole new chapter in my academic life.

A large chunk of my holiday was spent in geek mode. Yes, I partook of holiday spirits, exercised a bit, and relaxed — but I needed to do some pretty significant updates to some outdated servers that I’m responsible for on campus. One, I choose to run, and the other houses three pretty important sites. Here’s what I did.

A couple of years after I got to MSC, the Humanities Division got an Apple Xserve. We had several tasks for it: application sharing, file sharing, project storage, and a web server. It would support our Mac classroom, M-124. I remember getting that sweet piece of equipment; I liked it so much, I even kept it in my office for a while so I could pretend like I could feel the power of those dual G5 processors. I think this was 2004.

Well, since then, a lot has changed. There’s no longer a Humanities Division, but a Department of Media, Culture & the Arts and an English Department. I stayed with the former. I have been tenured, we have a new president, and we just got a new room full of iMacs — among other things. One thing that hasn’t changed: that Xserve is still around; however, it’s now obsolete. The last upgrade I was able to do to it was Leopard, and it will not run anything more recent from Apple. I began to run into problems with PHP and MySQL requirements on Moodle — Apple was no longer updating those in Leopard. Yes, I could have reverted to some command-line juju, but one of the reasons you get a server from Apple is that it has a purty GUI for all that admin stuff. Well, I learned my lesson.

When it comes to servers, there’s only one OS for me: Linux. And there’s only one flavor I eat: Debian. Oh, I’ve tried others, and some are pretty tasty, but like a good slice of cheese pizza, there’s just something that calls you back to the simplicity  – the minimalism of that perfect recipe. Plus, Debian is one of the only ones left that supports the now very obsolete PowerPC architecture. Man, when Apple decides to obsolete something, they do not mess around.

By this time, I’m a pretty experienced system administrator. If I don’t know how to do something, those better then I have already solved the problem and posted somewhere on the Interwebs. I really love the open-source community. When it came time to transfer, I was already prepared. My daily archives were ready on a backup disk, so I didn’t really need to do much else before the transfer. Since the Xserve has three drives, I just took the one out that had my Leopard Server install on it, and replaced it with a blank.

Debian installed with no problems whatever. Period. The server was up and running within twenty minutes with sshd ready for my work from home that night.

With my soft pants on and a Makers Mark on the desk, I set up the server that evening.

Apache

The first thing I needed to do was set up my LAMP server. The L(inux) part was done; that just left the AMP. I had done this many times, but this install would be different. Instead of one web site, I was running four, so I needed a configuration that could do this. I found this tutorial by Sam Kleinman. I didn’t need the scripting, so I skipped that section. WordPress needs the rewrite module, so that was the only extra module I activated. I got my idea for filesystem organization from this article by Steve Kemp.

The best part of this new process was Sam’s last advice on installing a multi-processing module. Basically, this lets users run their own Apache instances. This is a life-saver for upgrading both WordPress and Moodle, since the Web server is essentially running under the user account’s permissions.

Next, I just populated the accounts with the data from the most recent backups.

WordPress

There’s not much to say here, really. I installed the latest version of WordPress, added my database file, and uploaded my themes and plugins folders. The hardest part of installing WP is getting the permalinks working, but since I added the rewrite module to Apache and configured the preferences file already, they just worked.

Moodle

Moodle presented a bit more of a challenge because we had been running an old version. So not only were we moving servers, I had a significant update to the new version of Moodle. I initially installed a fresh version of Moodle using their new “git” install. Where has this been all my life? Git not only makes installs easier, but makes periodic updates significantly easier. Bravo!

Triggering the install from a web browser, I made sure I had all the modules installed that I needed for the new version. I did have to install a few, but Aptitude made this easy — another reason I like Debian. Once I was sure the server was ready for Moodle, I added my old preferences that pointed to the database file. It took some time, but I was able to upgrade to the new version (2.2) in about thirty minutes.

There are still some difficulties with the new version of Moodle, but these are just upgrading woes — they have nothing to do with the server. After installing, I did notice that Moodle wanted me to migrate my database from MyISAM to InnoBD. I followed the instructions in a tutorial that I can’t find now. It wasn’t a bad process, albeit a bit anxiety-inducing. It took a while because my database was big. After all, we have been using Moodle for at least six years.

Finally, I set up cron to trigger all my Moodle business every half-hour.

Tweaking

The rest was setting up a backup plan with an extra drive and cron. I even shared some ssh keys with my other server to do some remote daily backups. You can never bee too careful.

Finally, I discovered the php-apc performance tuner. It really made a difference on my server. For some reason, Xcache was already installed, but wasn’t helping. I ditched that and installed php-apc for a pretty significant difference. Follow Francois Planque’s tutorial for some more info and a way to measure your performance.

In all, a partial holiday well spent. Now, to get to that essay I need to write…