Academia: August 2007 Archive Page

Elia Powers:

Housing officers divided students into living groups, based upon major, age and other factors. So students who saw their list of 25, 50 or 75 (depending on the group) potential roommates already knew that those included would likely live on the same floor or at least in the same residence hall. It was their job — given names, e-mail addresses and personal Web pages — to pair off in a matter of three weeks. When two students agreed on a match, they notified the housing office, which Cumia said most likely accommodated the request. (Inside Higher Ed)

It's funny, because it's true.... David Galef satirizes the humiliation humanities professors have to go through when requesting research funds:

To Professor Michael Wall, Chair, English Department: This has to do with the travel budget for the coming academic year. As we discussed last spring, I need something on the order of $700 for the annual Joyce conference, held this year in Miami, December 3-5. I saved the department money last year by using Blackboard exclusively rather than hand out Xeroxes, and in any event, this shouldn’t break the bank, right? Let me know soon, please, because I have to book the flight. (Inside Higher Ed)

Seton Hill has actually been very good to me, though it was a struggle last year finding funds to bring students who were presenting at the 4Cs. (We managed.)

Some acted selflessly, rushing to the aid of other characters even though that meant they risked infection themselves. Others fled infected cities in an attempt to save themselves. And some who were sick made it their mission to deliberately infect others. --BBC

Wikipedia has a good collection of background resources on "corrupted blood," the virtual disease which afflicted avatars in World of Warcraft in 2005.

1. What Berlin wall?
35. Stadiums, rock tours and sporting events have always had corporate names.
43. Being a latchkey kid has never been a big deal.
53. Tiananmen Square is a 2008 Olympics venue, not the scene of a massacre.
55. MTV has never featured music videos.
66. The World Wide Web has been an online tool since they were born. --Beloit College

Which ones struck you the most? #66 really blew me away -- though CERN didn't actually open up the WWW to the general public as a free service until 1993. (I was taking a non-credit humanities computing class that summer, and one week the guest lecturer gave a demo of this new piece of software -- a "web browser" called Mosaic.)

Here's a collection of teaching tips for the first day of classes brought to us by Honolulu Community College (check their reference lists for more good sources, too). The Pig Personality Profile [try here -- DGJ] is frivolous fun, but probably a good icebreaker and something I might even use when I teach Memoir Writing again in 2005-6. I especially liked reviewing Joyce T. Povlacs' 101 Things You Can Do the First Three Weeks of Class. If your term is just getting started too, you might want to review this list.

Here's a carefully worded google search that results in a great sampler of more on this topic.  --Mike Arnzen

Our first day of classes isn't for another week. Today was a full day of meetings, with lots of slideshows bearing statistics about how many students are enrolled, how we are doing on various ongoing university goals, and so forth. I'll be chairing the undergraduate English program review committee, and I also volunteered to be part of an ad hoc committee implementing an undergraduate humanities conference next spring. We hope to encourage juniors to deliver research papers on campus, so that during their senior year they can apply to off-campus conferences. (I presented on academic panels with four undergraduates at two conferences, last year, and I'm excited by the prospect of establishing a more formal way to keep that momentum going.)

Getting ready for the students is foremost in my mind, even though I've got another full day of meetings tomorrow. So now that the kids are in bed I'm taking a moment to think about the first day of classes. I'm still casting about for a comfortable way to start the first day of classes. 

Because so little primary historical work has been done on the classic text computer game "Colossal Cave Adventure", academic and popular references to it frequently perpetuate inaccuracies. "Adventure" was the first in a series of text-based games ("interactive fiction") that emphasize exploring, puzzles, and story, typically in a fantasy setting; these games had a significant cultural impact in the late 1970s and a significant commercial presence in the early 1980s. Will Crowther based his program on a real cave in Kentucky; Don Woods expanded this version significantly. The expanded work has been examined as an occasion for narrative encounters (Buckles 1985) and as an aesthetic masterpiece of logic and utility (Knuth 1998); however, previous attempts to assess the significance of "Adventure" remain incomplete without access to Crowther's original source code and Crowther's original source cave. Accordingly, this paper analyzes previously unpublished files recovered from a backup of Woods's student account at Stanford, and documents an excursion to the real Colossal Cave in Kentucky in 2005. In addition, new interviews with Crowther, Woods, and their associates (particularly members of Crowther's family) provide new insights on the precise nature of Woods's significant contributions. Real locations in the cave and several artifacts (such as an iron rod and an axe head) correspond to their representation in Crowther's version; however, by May of 1977, Woods had expanded the game to include numerous locations that he invented, along with significant technical innovations (such as scorekeeping and a player inventory). Sources that incorrectly date Crowther's original to 1972 or 1974, or that identify it as a cartographic data file with no game or fantasy elements, are sourced thinly if at all. The new evidence establishes that Crowther wrote the game during the 1975-76 academic year and probably abandoned it in early 1976. The original game employed magic, humor, simple combat, and basic puzzles, all of which Woods greatly expanded. While Crowther remained largely faithful to the geography of the real cave, his original did introduce subtle changes to the environment in order to improve the gameplay. --Dennis G. Jerz --Somewhere Nearby is Colossal Cave: Examining Will Crowther's Original ''Adventure'' in Code and in Kentucky (Digital Humanities Quarterly)

One of the journal's editors, Matt Kirschenbaum, writes:

Just a post to draw attention to a major new piece in the current issue of Digital Humanities Quarterly (a venue which you all should be keeping tabs on anyway) on Will Crowther's original ADVENTURE (aka Colossal Cave).

In his "Somewhere Nearby is Colossal Cave: Examining Will Crowther's Original 'Adventure' in Code and in Kentucky," Dennis Jerz offers an archeology of the work's source code alongside of an exploration (photo-documented!) of the actual Mammoth Cave in Kentucky.

Scholars routinely mis-cite information as fundamental as ADVENTURE's date of composition, the kind of carelessness that reinforces the view that electronic objects exist outside of material histories and are impossible to take seriously as cultural artifacts. Jerz sets the record straight with rigorous textual scholarship based (in part) on the work's original magnetic back-up tapes, which is personally responsible for recovering.

Absolutely essential reading.

Update, Aug 11: Some reactions have started to appear on rec.arts.int-fiction.
Update, Aug 12: Matthew Russoto has posted compilable versions of Crowther's original source code. That was fast!
Update, Aug 13: David Kinder has posted a Windows executable based on Crowther's original source code. (The URL points to a temporary holding spot... I'll update the final URL when I find out what it is.)

MetaFilter and BoingBoing have also posted about the article.
Update, August 14: Slashdot compares the discovery of the code to the finding of the Holy Grail. Also, del.icio.us, reddit, Digg.

Like locked cell phones and copy-protected music, Facebook is on the wrong side of the open-network debate. Facebook is a sealed bubble. Facebook users are locked into Facebook, just as iTunes locks music fans to Apple's iPod.

This serves companies' business interests, but not the wider interests of consumers.

[...]

At this point, "friend" relationships remain unique to the social networks. The web still lacks a generalized way to convey relationships between people's identities on the internet. The absence of this secret sauce -- an underlying framework that connects "friends" and establishes trust relationships between peers -- is what gave rise to social networks in the first place. --Scott Gilbertson --Slap in the Facebook: It's Time for Social Networks to Open Up (Wired)

I couldn't have said it better. This is why I have no particular desire to use a fenced-in system. Yes, I have my students blog with MovableType, but the software is free for private users.

Having said that, I realize that the appeal for some people is precisely that they can share their information with a small group of friends, but all it takes is for one friend to squeal.

I also confess to feeling a bit uncomfortable at the prospect of contacting a researcher whose work I find useful, and telling them I want to be his or her "friend". In the clinically hierarchical world of academia, even "colleague" might be presumptuous.

Truthfully, I expected my new department would be grateful that I wasn't having kids. But the unofficial motto here seems to be "We do babies!" And indeed we do..... I couldn't believe that I was struggling to meet anyone who could go out for a drink. --Carol Peace --An Unexpecting Minority (Chronicle of Higher Education)

Who would have thought that academics with young children wouldn't have as much time to socialize as their child-free colleagues do?

I admire Peace for writing such a candid essay, and I note that she explicitly states her awareness of its self-pitying tone. She also points out that, from one perspective, it's a good thing that so many women in her department feel comfortable balancing work and family in this manner. Nevertheless, I have conflicted responses to this essay.

One colleague in my department has written several essays in The Chronicle of Higher Education about balancing her professional life with motherhood. She used to live too far away for us to get together, but she has recently moved very close, and we have already had playdates at the amusement park, a local museum (where the kids spent most of their time cutting up paper in the art room), and rodent-themed kiddie restaurant.

My response to Peace is that her colleagues with young children are probably very tired; they have less time for socializing of any kind; and they are probably worried about about taxing her patience.

If you spend a lot of time around smokers, or pet owners, or yodelers, you develop a tolerance for smoke, slobber, and yodeling, and you feel more relaxed around people who have a similarly high tolerance; consequently, you feel a bit uneasy when you're socializing with someone who doesn't share your interest in smoke, slobber, and yodeling, and you're never quite sure whether the person who says "Oh, I don't mind the smoke|slobber|yodeling one bit" is really about to scream but is instead trying to be polite -- and all the while planning to complain behind your back about how you thoughtlessly exposed them to an unreasonable amount of smoke|slobber|yodeling.

That sounds paranoid, but I am a social introvert (despite having an extroverted teaching persona), and social interactions don't always come naturally to me. Maybe Peace's colleagues simply aren't confident about what her reaction will be.

The cardinal rule of making friends is that you show an interest in what the other person likes to do. So, if Peace wants a quiet evening with the parents of young children, she might arrange for a teenage friend of the family to play with the kids in the backyard while the adults can have a quiet dinner.

I know I can be so completely wrapped up in parenting -- interrupting an adult conversation to ask a child sotto voce where she left her sippy cup and then trying to slip immediately back into the conversation. Like most parents, I've developed the ability to tune out kid disruptions that don't cross a certain line, and I'd like to think that I'm capable of adjusting that line depending on the circumstances.

I remember several times at my previous job when my wife and I accepted an invitation to bring our child to the house of a childless colleague. We made it clear that baby Peter was in the "cruising" phase, where he couldn't quite stand by himself and so was likely to lean or pull on the furniture in order to get around.

All evening, one of us had to follow Peter around so that he wouldn't yank down a tablecloth or grab a statue off of a coffee table or crawl into the kitty litter box or tumble down the stairs. Our hosts kept inviting us both to sit down at the same time, but even if they were telling the truth and it wouldn't have bothered them if we hadn't stopped that lamp from toppling over, we didn't it want it falling on our son's head. If our son had spit up on the imported carpet or scratched the flatscreen TV, we would have felt obligated to pay for it. At the time, we were eating off of a folding card table and our living room couch was the same futon we had used as grad students, and all the items of value (my laptop, precious books, etc.) were sequestered behind a baby gate in the study. It was very stressful for us to watch our son as he tried to finger unprotected wall outlets (can a baby really get a shocking by poking a finger in one of those? I don't want to find out) and reached for knicknacks on the bottom shelves (where we always deliberately left toys for him to grab).

Two female colleagues a few doors away from my office had young children around the same age as my son. My wife's decision to be a full-time parent automatically put me in a different category; they were working moms who had to make hard decisions about how to balance their home and professional lives. No matter how equitably my wife and I divided up the chores -- when I came home, my wife would often hand me a poopy baby and then retreat to the bedroom for the rest of the evening, while I made dinner, gave the baths and read the bedtime stories -- when I was at work, I was always a man whose career was riding on my wife's back.

One day we encountered a faculty couple walking together alone in the mall; classes weren't in session, but they still dropped their child off at daycare. I don't mean to say their decision was wrong, but it wasn't a decision that either of us would have made. My wife and I even babysat this couple's child once so that they could do something together, though they never offered to return the favor.

My point is not to criticize or gripe, but rather to point out that even though a child does give colleagues one more thing in common, all child-having couples are not automatically members of the same social group.

My kids are thumping on the floor above my study crying out to be fed, so I've got to end this blog entry now. If there are any rough spots, so be it -- I've got macaroni noodles to cook.

The administrators generally agreed that people skills were important, yet those skills remain underrepresented in required courses. One likely explanation: Students don't like the courses, and they are pressuring administrators to drop them.

When curricula emphasize soft skills, administrators "are significantly more likely to report increased pressure from students to change the curriculum," the researchers said.

"Given that students are indeed the direct consumer and key revenue stream of most M.B.A. programs," they write, "this finding supports recent assertions that students' general disdain for people-focused course work drives considerable policy decisions regarding curricula. ... This finding may suggest that with respect to designing a relevant M.B.A., the customer is not always right." -Katherine Mangan --Companies and Business Students Differ on What Skills M.B.A. Programs Should Teach (Chronicle of Higher Education (subscription))

How can we fathom the values and preoccupations of the American people (no matter what their race, gender, or class) without paying attention to the nation's literature, painting, architecture, music, theater, and movies? If culture plays as significant a role as social, political, or economic issues in helping us make sense of the American past, why then do American historians expend so much effort analyzing the plight of women and workers, or the policies of Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman, and almost no time at all interpreting the paintings of Edward Hopper, the cartoons of Walt Disney, the lyrics of Cole Porter, the choreography of Jerome Robbins, the plays of Eugene O'Neill, or the films of Elia Kazan? --Richard Pells --History Descending a Staircase: American Historians and American Culture (Chronicle of Higher Education)