On the Search for the Genuine

A Must-Read NYT Article for Anyone in Academia

Posted by Jen - 27/05/09 at 11:05:22 am

Thanks to a link from my Twitter feed, I read a great article  in the New York Times called “The Case for Working With Your Hands”.  I think everyone in academia, especially anyone involved in helping undergraduates decide what to do with their lives, needs to read this article and think about it.  Carefully.  And seriously.

Crawford’s article is a gentle apologetics for the vocational trades, beautifully written and carefully thought out.  He argues that our service-driven economy has become so obsessed with academic credentials that we no longer appreciate or see the economic and psychological wisdom of pursuing a hands-on vocation.  Nor do we think carefully about what we want to do when we grow up; if we can psychologically and physically stand to stay in school, then we run after the biggest academic prize we can find, often without considering whether that degree serves our best interest or our future career.

I was delighted and ashamed at once to recognize myself as one of the people Crawford was indicting as a degree-chaser, at least I was in my past.  I used to feel deep shame that I hadn’t blown right through undergrad to a PhD, obtaining a doctorate by my mid-twenties, which is what I’d been told that “gifted students” were supposed to do with their lives.  I felt like I was behind the curve.  But maybe entirely by accident, I was saved from my own fate when I–gasp!–took a teaching job for 3 years and bought a young, green horse to bring along as an eventer.  In my world, that’s almost as “weird” as walking away from an academic job to take up motorcycle repair (as Crawford did).   And both, to be frank, were complete accidents of fate.

I’m sad to say that I’ve got a lot of unhappy friends who either hate the career they chose, or more commonly, love the discipline they’re studying but fell into some ugly academic political situations (either because of the economy or because they didn’t know to ask about those things before they chose their graduate program).  And I don’t blame them.  Based on my interactions with graduate student writers in my work over the last three years, the best recommended reading before graduate school would be The Art of War (if there was ever a hands-on profession that involved creative problem solving, it’s military work).

Don’t get me wrong, I am thrilled to be pursuing a second master’s and a first doctorate at Ohio State this August, and even more thrilled to have found a program and advisors that seem just as excited about me as I am about them.  I think I’ll avoid a lot of the jaded feelings toward academia that I see my friends getting because I took some time to live as a bottom feeder (aka “lecturer”), so I’m going in with my eyes open.  But you bet my horse is coming with me, and you bet I’m scheduling 2 or 3 days a week of “barn time” for decompression.  I think what I get from having a horse is the same rush that Crawford gets from playing with motorcycles; it’s a way to work an entirely other part of my brain, and it’s the kind of work that requires you to be 100% physically and mentally present.  You don’t have any other choice when you’ve got a half-ton animal to control.

I don’t have it all figured out yet, and I don’t think Crawford claims to have it all figured out either.  But I dig where he’s going with his logic.  Maybe the biggest problem with American society is that we claim to go confidently in the direction of our dreams, but we don’t stop often enough to audit our dream.  Crawford is reminding us to do that–even if we stay on the same path, even if very little changes on the outside, maybe we need to embrace new ways to conceptualize our work and our worth.

How the Grocery Game Cut My Monthly Shopping Bills In Half. Yes, really.

Posted by Jen - 20/05/09 at 09:05:43 pm

I don’t pay for toothpaste anymore. Toothbrushes either. I begrudgingly paid 19 cents per bottle for conditioner last Sunday, but usually I don’t pay for shampoo or conditioner. Deodorant and shaving gel are capped at 99 cents. Paper towels max out at 62 cents per roll. And damned if I remember the last time I saved less than 45 percent off retail at the grocery store.

Now that I have your attention, let’s talk about The Grocery Game in a way that I don’t see most bloggers talking about it. You might have already read a blog post or two about the Grocery Game, and it probably ended with “And I just don’t think it’s worth the subscription fee”. That tends to come from people who only tried 2 or 3 weeks of the 4-week Grocery Game trial (which costs $1). Rather than explain the Grocery Game–which is very adequately explained at this link, read it now if you have no idea what I’m talking about–I’ll offer instead some of the main reasons why my lazy friends balk at the idea of joining The Game, plus rebuttals.

Let me say before I start that The Grocery Game is not compensating me in any way for doing this, they did not ask me to do this, and I don’t get anything for doing this. I just really believe in this system. Have a peek at my Kroger receipt from last week. That is a normal receipt in my world. Totally normal. Unremarkable, in fact. On a good week, I would expect to save 65 or 70 percent off retail instead of a mere 45.

COMPLAINTS AND ANSWERS

1. I just shop for me/for me and my husband/for a very small family, so what’s the point? The Grocery Game has saved me well over $1500 in the last year for a household of two people, and apparently that makes me a lightweight; there are people at Teri’s Message Board who talk about supporting families of 6 on $300 per month.  And yes, that figure includes food + household items + health and beauty products all rolled into one.

At first I thought it might be a scam, but it is anything but. I soon converted my mother to it, then my sister, then I started converting my horse-loving friends (we have to pay for our horse obsession somehow, you know). And now I want to convert you.  Because seriously, if you are not doing this, you are throwing your cash away.

2. I don’t shop at the stores that are available in my area for Grocery Game. Could you be convinced to switch if it would cut your bills in half? You wouldn’t have caught me dead in a CVS or Rite Aid before The Grocery Game, but I’m in there every week now feeling like a downright thief. It’s not unusual for me to come out a few bucks ahead at CVS–yes, meaning that I walk out richer than I walked in AND I’ve got a bag of stuff in my hand–and Rite Aid hooked me up with $50+ of free cold medicine last year (mmm, TheraFlu Warming Liquid). I never thought I could save money at an overpriced drug store, but oh baby, you CAN. Reread my first paragraph if you’re starting to doubt. I was not joking, and most of those deals come from CVS and Rite Aid.

I have lots of friends who pout and moan when their favorite grocery store isn’t a Grocery Game store.  If your store doesn’t have a List, take that as a sign that your favorite grocer is a ripoff. The Grocery Game doesn’t play favorites–in some areas they have 8 or 10 grocery and drug stores available. But they’re not going to publish a list if the savings are only so-so.

3. The Grocery Game subscription price is too high. Really?  Let’s run those numbers.  I pay $2.50 per week to look at 3 Grocery Game store lists (Kroger, CVS, Rite Aid) plus $1.00 per week for the Sunday newspaper to access coupons.  I saved $5.68 alone in COUPONS at Kroger last week, meaning I’m ahead $2.18 even if we only look at the coupon savings that I wouldn’t have known about.  Already I’ve more than compensated for the subscription fee, and I wouldn’t even call that a good coupon week.  On a good coupon week, I’m saving $15-$20 with coupons alone.

But that’s before we even start talking about the free stuff from CVS and Rite Aid, the unadvertised sales that The Grocery Game list told me about, the Internet printable coupons that The Grocery Game so nicely linked me directly to, etc.  Add in one free bottle of shampoo/toothpaste/whatever each week (and often more than that), plus maybe $3 off for Internet coupons each week, and now we’re talking about some serious savings that really matter.

Do you see how that Kroger receipt says at the bottom “You’ve saved $521 this year?” They don’t even count coupon savings in that Plus Card Savings total, which means you have to add about $10 more per week for coupon savings (about $200 year-to-date just for Kroger).

Across the course of a year, I pay $182 in subscription fees + newspaper subscription costs, but it’s cut my monthly grocery/household bill from $350/month to $180/month. Thus, one year of the Grocery Game pays for itself in one measly month of the year.  For the other 11 months, I free ride on my savings.

4. I don’t have time to cut coupons and/or coupons make me feel like a housewife. Cutting coupons ain’t my idea of fun either, but The Grocery Game list tells you exactly where each coupon is located–for example, maybe it says there’s a Ball Park Franks coupon in the Smartsource coupon insert from the April 26th newspaper. I keep my coupon inserts filed in a binder, and when it’s time to use a single coupon, THEN I track it down and cut it. This, I want to add, is one reason why people doing the 4-week Grocery Game trial tend to see only so-so results and then write blog posts about how it’s “not really worth it”. You won’t get the full force of The Grocery Game until you have 12 weeks of coupons in your binder. Then it will cut into your budget like a bat out of hell. If you don’t buy that argument, try making a list during your trial period of every coupon you WOULD have used if you’d had the insert that it originally came in. If you’re like me, it will be at least $10 in coupons weekly, and probably much more.

5. I don’t have time to shop in multiple stores each week. Well if you shop like the other sadsacks that I see who don’t play the Grocery Game, then yeah, you’re going to be there all night. I have stopped going to the grocery store on weekends because I get dirty looks from all the people who are agonizing over the shelves, comparing five different brands of each product on their shopping list, then bickering with their SO’s about whether they “really need” to buy that product because money is really tight. It takes them five minutes to buy ONE item, times dozens of items on their list (and 9 times out of 10, they don’t choose the best deal). And there I am, breezing down the aisle, going directly to the product I need, dropping it in the cart, and moving on. No wonder they sneer at me; they probably think I’m wealthy or insane or both. Just the other day, someone literally sneered at me when I was buying 10 cartons of Yoplait yogurt.  He was buying the 39-cent Kroger brand.  I’m sure that in his mind, I was buying 55-cent Yoplait brand and was therefore a total moron.  He iddn’t know that I was paying 22 cents apiece after coupons–nearly half of what he was paying for the genric brand.

I can get in and out of Kroger in 10 minutes if I really scurry. So pick your poison: Spend 45 minutes in the grocery store agonizing over your shopping list, or spend 10 minutes blowing through + 10 minutes at home to prepare your shopping list. Personally, I like the 20 minute option.

6. I tried the 4-week trial, and the groceries that I needed weren’t on the list every week. This will seem to go against all common sense and logic, but to play the Grocery Game, you must understand and accept that not every product you need goes on super duper ridiculous sale every week. But over the course of 8 to 12 weeks, damn near anything in the store will go on super duper ridiculous sale–that’s how the manufacturers and stores rig it.  And their favorite part is to stagger the best possible store price and the week a coupon is issued onto different weeks, so that you’ll run out and use your coupon on a week when the item isn’t yet optimally priced.

Part of the Grocery Game’s service is that they keep a price database of prices over the past weeks, so they can tell you when the iron is hot and it’s time to buy something at super duper ridiculous price. Smart Grocery Gamers stockpile important items when they go on sale and don’t wait to “need” the item. I might not need a 74-cent bottle of Softsoap now, but I will need it in 3 weeks when it’s not likely to be on sale, so in the cart it goes and I’ll store it until I need it. Ask my husband about the 12 boxes of Rice Chex and Cheerios that we have in the pantry closet–all purchased for $1.67 per box or less (retail price $3.99), or about the 150 packets of instant oatmeal purchased last year for 8 cents apiece that we’re still working our way through. Stockpiling a little trickier to do with meat or produce, but I freeze a lot of meat and cook with whatever produce is on sale that week. Chris said that when we move to Columbus, we should buy a chest freezer so we can really work the meat deals.

7. I already do fine buying the generic brands and buying in bulk. I used to be like you. I really thought I was doing great, making the rounds between Wal-Mart and Sam’s Club and Dollar Tree, sharking for the best deals. Let me say it one more time, folks: compared to that method, the Grocery Game cut my monthly groceries and household bill in half. HALF. I know it’s hard to believe. My mother certainly found it hard to believe. So did my sister. But if you’ve got $11-$20 to invest in the 4-week trial plus 8 more weeks to really build your coupon stash, you will see that it works.

If that’s not convincing enough, I can only say one more thing. My sister, in past years of her life, was poor. She knew Wal-Mart well. But she called me last November, deeply dismayed, and I thought maybe she was going to say that her dog was sick or her husband just lost his job. Instead, she said, “I tried to go to Wal-Mart today. Everything in there is so expensive compared to the Grocery Game. It wasn’t fun to be in Wal-Mart anymore!”

Now if that isn’t a testimonial, what is?

So let’s talk about what you’re going to do if this Grocery Game gig really interests you.

• Cruise over to The Grocery Game web site and check what stores are available in your area by entering your zip code at this link.
• Whip out that credit card and pay your $1.00 for a 4-week trial. VERY IMPORTANT TIP for trial folks: You get as many stores as you want for $1, so during your trial, get all the lists for all the stores available in your area, even if you are absolutely convinced that you will never shop there. Before I joined The Grocery Game, I hadn’t been in a CVS Pharmacy since my college days.  Now I’m in there every week.  They don’t quite know me by name, but we’re getting to that point.
• Start making plans to buy the biggest Sunday newspaper in your area, preferably one from the nearest major city (which will tend to have the most/best coupons). In my area, that’s The Detroit Free Press. One newspaper per week is enough to get you started. Some GG’ers maximize savings by having one newspaper per member of their family, so if you have a huge family, you might plan on multiples.
• For this first week only, set aside an hour or so to carefully and slowly read the instructions in the headers of your Grocery Game lists.The learning curve on understanding the Grocery Game list is steep;  I have an MFA in Creative Writing and two B.A. degrees, and I spent 3 hours reading my first-ever Grocery Game list. Persevere! You will get it, and once you get it, it takes all of 5 minutes to read the list each week.
• Visit Teri’s Message Board, where all the Grocery Game addicts (and there are thousands of them) hang out. There’s a helpful section called Welcome Newcomers if you are skeptical, confused, lost, or otherwise impaired.

Good luck. Now excuse me, I’m off to score some 8-cent-per-bottle brand name salad dressing.

Catness Cuteness

Posted by Jen - 15/05/09 at 08:05:52 pm

I know one really shouldn’t blog one’s own cat, but look at this. Imagine having to live with this level of preciousness every day of your life. It’s great once you build immunity to wanting to a) squeeze her really hard and b) having her strike this pose while you’re trying to work out, as if to taunt you.

Go Blue? Nooooo, go Buckeyes! I'm off to OSU for my PhD!

Posted by Jen - 13/05/09 at 12:05:33 pm

The cat’s out of the bag on this to most of my real-life family and friends, but I suppose I should make it official.

After teaching for U of M’s CSP Bridge program in July and August, I’ll be leaving my lecturer gig in the Sweetland Writing Center to attend Ohio State University’s MA/PhD program in English, where I hope to dissertate on digital rhetoric in the undergrad curriculum. The MA part shouldn’t take too long thanks to my transfer credit from my MFA, and the Digital Media Studies faculty at OSU English are a dream team for the kind of research that I want to do. I guess they like me based on the financial offer they made!  I thought I was going to have to downgrade my lifestyle to go to grad school, but I might actually get to upgrade!

OSU English gets five stars thus far for outstanding academic advising. I had my advisor assigned before the end of April (school doesn’t even start ’til the end of September), they gave me exactly the advisor I wanted, and her first official email to me starting with the subject line “Yippppppeeeeeeee!”. Having been around the grad school block once with my MFA, I was shocked to see the “we want you and love you” vibes continuing even AFTER I submitted my acceptance. How…unusual. And cool.

For my personal friends, here’s the answer to the four most popular questions that follow this big news:

1. Yes, my horse Skyler is coming with me. Of course.
2. Yes, my husband is coming with me too, and miraculously he found a perfect job in Columbus within weeks of my acceptance to OSU.
3. No, I am not particularly worried about the OSU/U of M rivalry. Although I will have to replace my Michigan license plates before the OSU football season begins, and I would like to own this ridiculous contraption before it’s all said and done:
   

   Ohio State Grill Topper

4. No, I’m not worried about getting a job when I graduate. That’s one good thing about waiting to do my PhD–if I’d tried to make this call when I was 21 or 22, GUARANTEED I would have picked the wrong career for me: either law school or a PhD in Lang/Lit, and I would have disliked the actual job in the former and would have ended up unemployed if I’d chosen the latter.  Digital Media Studies is, thankfully, still a hot job field, and they’ll pay me to do three of my favorite things: mess with my computer, teach at the college level, and write.  Where else can I count “teaching myself Flash” and “improving my Twitter following” as job-related activities!?  Now let’s all knock on big pieces of wood and hope that job market will still be hot in 4-5 years when I’m done!

Anyway, I’m pretty psyched. My “self assigned vacation job of the week” has been to find a good realtor, and I think I’ve pulled it off. More on that as the house search continues.

Digital Rhetoric Nerding: Daniel Anderson at UNC and Clay Shirky at NYU

Posted by Jen - 10/05/09 at 02:05:00 pm

It’s no secret to people who work with me that I am a massive digital rhetoric nerd.  I’m hungry to see examples of great digital arguments being built in the undergrad curriculum, to understand them and analyze them, and to contribute to their spread (which is why I’m going back to grad school–more on that in a future post).  There’s a fair number of us trying to do it, but very few that I’d say are genuinely succeeding.  And two of the people that I think is doing that best is Todd Taylor and Daniel Anderson, both professors at UNC-Chapel Hill.

Dan Anderson is did these amazing digital mashups with his 2008 students, and in this video of his 4C’s presentation, he’s talking about (and showing) video mashups that his freshman students did: Mix and Mash Literacy.

So if that gets you addicted to Dan Anderson’s students’ work, see all of the class projects from that 2009 course on his LitCast page. Or, if you become a Dan Anderson addict, as I am, you can go to his professional web site and see even more of his projects.

And finally, Dan Anderson’s presentation briefly excerpts from Clay Shirky’s keynote at the 2008 Web 2.0 Expo, which is an excellent speech about social collaboration. Totally worth watching.

Taking Twitter Seriously: I Never Thought The Day Would Come

Posted by Jen - 09/05/09 at 08:05:47 am

Until yesterday at 9:00 a.m., I had A LOT of trouble taking Twitter seriously.  I’d been introduced to it about 10 months ago at an academic conference, but it just seemed…noisy.  Stupid.  Redundant with Facebook.

That all changed because of Chris Myers, the web guy at UM’s Ford School of Public Policy.  Yesterday morning, he gave a presentation titled “Taking Twitter Seriously”  during UM’s Enriching Scholarship 2009 conference (follow him on Twitter @myersca).  I now see Twitter in a very different way and have been having tons of fun reading other people’s Tweets (and occasionally tweeting myself, of course!).

Chris’ presentation was so helpful that I decided to blog about it.  All of the links below come from Chris’ great online Google Doc of Twitter Resources, so if you’re looking for exhaustive Twitter resources, here it is.  But I’ll try to hit the high points.

First, if you have no idea what Twitter is and need a crash course, click here. Or, if you’re a visual learner, click here for a Youtube vid about Twitter.

Regarding Twitter accounts, you can have as many as you want.  Chris Myers suggested having one “professional” account and one for personal use, but I’m going to stick with one account for now.  If I have something really personal to say, I say it on Facebook to my “real friends”.  As Chris Myers said, Twitter shines when you have an idea or piece of information to spread, not necessarily when you want to tell the world what you ate for breakfast.

If you need to find worthwhile people to follow on Twitter but don’t know where to start, try the search at Twitter.Grader, WeFollow, and Twellow.com.  Don’t forget to look up important people in your academic or career field and follow them!  And of course, whenever you follow someone, don’t forget to check their followers/following, where you can often find some excellent additional people to follow.

If you’re wondering who’s following you, or maybe you’re following someone like @mashable who has jillions of followers and you want to identify just the most enticing ones, try Twitual.com.

If you want to be able to see your Facebook status updates and Tweets in one place without having to switch back and forth between the two web sites, download a free desktop management piece like TweetDeck or Seesmic Desktop.  Both allow you to post Facebook status updates and Tweets from the same desktop-based interface.  I tried both, and ultimately I went with Seesmic Desktop because I felt its group-making capabilities were better, and sometimes I only want to see a fraction of available tweets on my following list (for example, maybe I want to see just the tweets from news organizations or just the tweets from my real-life personal friends.) Seesmic was also more seamlessly integrated with Facebook–it showed me pictures and links in addition to Facebook status updates whereas TweetDeck only showed the status updates.

If you prefer to Tweet from an iPod Touch or an iPhone, I have done just fine on my iPod Touch with Twitterfon (a free App), but Kevin Rose at my favorite podcast Diggnation likes Tweetie (a paid App), and the blogosphere seems to like Twitteriffic (a paid App that lets you manage multiple Twitter accounts at once).  For you crackberry addicts out there, try Twitterberry.  You can also tweet via text message, so no excuses for those of us with “regular” phones.

By the time I peeled through those resources, I was already a Twittering maniac.  My newly improved Twitter feed, which jumped from following about 10 people to about 40 people, was pumping out tons of amazing links and ideas that I would have never found without Twitter.  And that made me hungry for more Twitter Toys, but I’m just barely scratching the surface there.

For example, I would love to use Twitter interactively in a presentation or in one of my classes. For that, Tweetchat.com is a great resource–it will show you only the Twitters that include a certain hashmark.  For example, here’s the Tweetchat room from Chris Myers’ presentation (you’ll have to log in using a Twitter name and ID, but you didn’t need to be at the meeting to see the Tweetchat).

There’s lots of good advice on the Internet about how to dig deeper with Twitter.  I’m slowly peeling my way through “7 ways to use twitter to engage your audience”, “Twitter for Academia”, “How to present while people are twittering”, “5 Terriffic Twitter Research Tools”, and most awesomely of all, “99 Essential Twitter Tools and Applications”.

Whew!  I’m ex-tweet-austed after all that.  Two last things, and off you go to Twittervillle: Thanks to Wefunction.com for the cute Twitter bird in this post, and don’t forget to follow me on Twitter!

A Commencement Speech That Genuinely Captures the Michigan Difference

Posted by Jen - 07/05/09 at 04:05:52 pm

I met George Dong three years ago in the Sweetland Writing Workshop.  It was my first semester as a full-time faculty member, and while I was loving my work in the Writing Workshop, I had noticed that we saw very few creative writing assignments.  Then, one Friday, George Dong walked into my office.  He was taking English 223: Intro to Creative Writing, and he put a poem down on my desk.  He leaned down over his page, pointed to several stanzas, and said with a big smile, “You can just ignore this part.  It’s B.S.  I didn’t really know what I was doing there.”

While those stanzas did turn out to be complete B.S., what I appreciated most is that a) George had the courage to write the stanzas, which were the product of a brave but failed rhetorical experiment, b) George had the courage to leave those stanzas on the page and show them to me, because even though I agreed with him that they were utter  B.S., talking through what made those stanzas so B.S. helped us arrive at a much stronger and genuine version of what George was trying to say, and c) George was a good sport about his own education.  Teachers are not supposed to play favorites, but I don’t think it’s any great secret that the Sweetland staff and faculty all loved George and looked forward to his tall form lumbering into the office with another paper and a cheerful smile.

George came to the Writing Workshop frequently over the next few years–always by choice, never by recommendation of his teacher–and it got to the point where I’d smile just from seeing his name on my daily schedule.  I knew that if George was coming to my office, I’d be spending at least half  hour with someone who was dedicated, cheerful, fun to be around, and grateful for the opportunities he’d been given.  I saw George grow into a talented young writer, one that I sincerely hope will become a published professional author–he has much to say to the world, and because of his careful study of the literary canon and his endless courage in improving his own writing, I have every reason to think he’ll achieve that goal.

The last time that I saw George in my Sweetland office was on unofficial business: he wanted to show me the speech that he was submitting to the committee that chooses a single student to speak at UM Commencement.  In that speech, I saw how much George had grown as a writer and a citizen of the world.  Honestly, I didn’t think the University would accept it for the final speech–they’re in the habit of choosing very Ken-and-Barbie types for the UM Commencement speaker, and while George had written an incredibly moving speech, he is anything but a generic plastic student with a generic plastic story.  Imagine my delight when he was chosen as Commencement speaker, and as the video below shows, George exceeded all of our expectaitons!

When I first arrived at Michigan in 2004, I thought it was like any other big university: prestigious but impersonal, rigorous but abstract, full of students who were smart but not street-smart.  Over the years, all of those ideas fell apart, and I came to believe wholeheartedly in The Michigan Difference: a student experience in which students actively connect their coursework and school experiences to the real world, producing students who genuinely can and will change the world someday.  George Dong is one of them.  I wish him all the best in the future, and Go Blue to the Class of 2009!

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kqp5_L8o3VE]

Thylias Moss' Online Vector Poems: Write One Yourself!

Posted by Jen - 07/05/09 at 04:05:03 pm

The first time I heard Thylias Moss’ name, I was a senior undergrad at the University of Virginia sitting in Rita Dove’s office.  She was suggesting potential MFA programs to me, and when we began discussing the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor, Rita said, “Thylias Moss is there.  Thylias is a maniac, and that’s exactly what you’ll think of her when you meet her.  You’ll get over that in about 30 days–she is a madwoman, but she’ll teach you to see the world in a new way.”  And sure enough, Rita was right.  For about 30 days, I couldn’t figure out why I was being assigned books on chaos theory, fractals, and the Platonic and Archimedean solids in what was “supposed” to be a poetry class.  But before I knew it, Thylias had me thinking about poetry in new–and more amazingly, fresh and exciting–ways.  I was walking around thinking things like, “If poem is like fork, and fork has branches, then is web more like fork or like spoon?”

Anyway, I owe Thylias a great deal, not only for changing the way I think about poetry but for changing the way I thought about words and literacy.  It was in Thylias’ class that, for the first time, I constructed a video poem in which the words moved, in which sound and video played a key role, in which my poem was more than just the words themselves.

Fortunately, one of Thylias’ latest projects called Vector Poem helps you experience that fun without the hell and hassle of learning Final Cut Pro.  In this flash-based prototype for what I’m sure will be many more Vector Poems to come, you can rearrange individual lines of poetry to create your own version.  Scott Hamm at U of M’s LSA built it under Thylias’ direction.  Go!  Write a Vector Poem at this link! Have fun!  Here’s mine:

Skyler's First Week at Dillman College

Posted by Jen - 06/05/09 at 08:05:28 pm

The first thing I tell all of my argument classes is that a great piece of writing suits its argument and its author’s purpose.  Well today, I’m going to break that rule.  I don’t give two rips whether you care about Skyler’s first week of training–I’m feeling like a proud mommy who’s kid just went off to college, I’ve got some separation anxiety as a result, and if my audience wants to come along for the ride, welcome to the party!

Firstly, let’s all appreciate the beauty of Alison and Ian Dillman’s Pine Creek Farm.  I’ve been working with the Dillmans for over 18 months now, but because their farm is an hour from Ann Arbor in Holly, I’d only been there a few times before moving Skyler up there last Thursday.  I always forget how beautiful it is–this would be a perfectly normal and average barn in Northern Virginia (where I grew up), but in Michigan, you almost never see a barn this beautiful, clean, and organized:

I thought Skyler wouldn’t be too happy to go from 10 hours’ daily turnout to 3-4 hours’ daily turnout, but he seems thrilled with his new, huge-mongous stall with its super-soft bedding.  Every time I’ve visited him, he’s either lying down and napping, “chatting” with his neighbor through the bar slats, or sticking his nosy head into the aisle to watch the world go by.  He doesn’t seem the least bit stressed:

And here he is with Ian, the 6′4″ Legs of Steel.  Ian hacks all the horses on the gravel roads around the barn, as well as up and down this hill on the property:

And of course, a training ride at the eventing barn wouldn’t be complete without running through some water.  Alison was giving Sue a lesson nearby and yelled out, “I guess he doesn’t have water issues!”

Gaming: The Future of Learning? At the very least, it'll be a way to kill time on the Internet…

Posted by Jen - 05/05/09 at 08:05:17 am

I am determined to start blogging more consistently, even if it means borderline micro-blogging!

Today, I went to an awesome keynote address at the University of Michigan Enriching Scholarship conference.  It was by Jane McGonigal Ph.D., Director of Game Research for The Institute for the Future.  Despite IFTF’s completely lame-sounding name, they have a fascinating mission: to use information about the past and signals in our current culture to predict directions that the future might go–not because they think there’s one single predictable future out there, but because if we knew about the possible futures available, we might be able to meaningfully change our actions to maximize the future that we’ll actually get.

In her keynote address titled “Epic Win: Why Gaming is the Future of Learning” (see the slides from her talk by clicking here), McGonigal talked about research into gaming and why gaming has become such a pervasive cross-cultural phenomenon.  Among other things, one of the reasons that gaming attracts people is that it can make them feel like they’re part of something larger–there’s a greater incentive to collaborate when you feel like your small, tangible accomplishments (like levelling up in a game) contribute to a larger goal.

While that might sound like the domain of lazy teenagers slouching over their gaming mice, squinting through the Cheetos Dust in the air to see their World of Warcraft Screen, the rest of us People Who Claim to Be More Productive Than WoW People can play some awesome online games that contribute meaningfully to future development.

One example is Galaxy Zoo, “where you can help astronomers explore the universe”.  Basically, this game prompts you to classify objects photographed in space by shape, which researchers then use to build insights about the universe.  It turns out that human beings are much better at this classification than computers, and it’s fun to boot.  Here’s a screen capture of me playing Galaxy Zoo:

Another is FoldIt, a game in which you follow a few simple rules of protein folding to generate new protein structures so that scientists can better understand and notice interesting patterns in protein folding. Again, this turns out to be something that humans do much more quickly and effectively than computers.  While this might sound incredibly boring, I just signed up and started playing, and it’s addicting–imagine if Bedazzled actually had a real-life reason for existing, giving you a reason to feel like you’re slacking off!

Finally, McGonigal mentioned two other online games that, while technically time-bound and already complete projects, were extremely cool and still worth checking out:

World Without Oil — an Institute for the Future and PBS collaboration from a few years ago that asked real-life people to change their real lives for 6 weeks to match simulated conditions, then had the players report on those life changes and how the world might change if our oil supply decreased significantly.

Superstruct — Imagine if humanity was scheduled to expire in 2038 due to six major problems, among them pandemic disease, major famine due to overpopulation, the migration of 250 million people inland as global warming gobbled up land mass, etc.  What could you, as an individual person with a unique set of job and life skills, do to react and change that situation?  Superstruct challenges you to find out.

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