Open Access Monographs?

Since we have been talking about book publishing: A new report by the AAUP raises the possibility of open access, electronic monographs. The InsideHigherEd article is here.

From Diss to Book

Both Dr. Crazy and Jason Jones give their stories of converting their dissertations to books, here and here.

Visual dictionary

I'm shamelessly stealing this link for a visual dictionary from Jason Jones's blog. It's a fun thing to play with. I don't know how to use it for any practical purpose at the moment. But I'm sure there's one out there.

Save the date

On April 13, Woodruff Library will be holding a symposium on "The Library and the Production of Knowledge in a Digital Age." Among the featured speakers will be Rosemary Feal, executive director of the MLA, who will talk about the evaluation of digital scholarship for tenure and promotion. It's a must-see for anyone in the humanities, but especially for a tech-savvy group like this one. Time and details to be announced.

Timothy Burke on academic blogging

I'm a fan of Timothy Burke's Easily Distracted; his posts are less frequent than some others, but more substantive. Here's his outline of a presentation on academic blogging.

Saving Streaming Video

While prepping for class earlier in the week, I stumbled across a YouTube clip of a stage production of Coriolanus that I wanted to show to my class. I wanted us to watch it together and then discuss it as a group, but because I am in the not-so-smart 181 room (no projection equipment), I asked the kind folks at ECIT to help me figure out how to capture the stream and save it on my iPod. They clued me in on the following websites, which let me do all of this on the fly (no new software downloads required) and with minimal hassle: KeepVid lets you copy-and-paste the URL from any of a host of video-sharing sites (YouTube, Google Video, iFilm, etc.) and record the video stream as a Flash (.flv) file. Once that is accomplished, you can use Media Convert to change the Flash file to an iPod-compatible mp4 format, which can be saved to your hard drive or thumb drive. Drag this new file into iTunes, sync up your iPod, and you're done. It took me about ten minutes to do all of this with a two-minute, 5MB clip, and about half that time was taken up just loading it onto my iPod from iTunes.

One other interesting note: Media Convert also allows you to convert sound, image, and text files from one format to another. Sadly, about the only thing it will not do is convert freshman writing into MLA format or Standard Written English.

More graduate funding at Chicago

Chicago is increasing its funding for graduate students (you can read about it here), and one of their professed reasons for doing so is to help students finish their degrees in a timely manner. Among the perks -- two funded summers for research and fully subsidized health insurance that grandfathers in all students.

iPods and Education

Here is a CNN.com article on the increasing use of iPods in the classroom.

A Dean's view of the MLA report

Catharine Stimpson, dean of the NYU Grad school, weighs in on the MLA report on promotion and tenure here.

Beyond the hurdles

Both of these posts -- here and here -- are worth reading because they are about what I think is a common feature in the careers of tenure-track professors, a sense of confusion once one has the job that one has been working so long towards. This may seem like a problem that is irrelevant to your graduate student careers, but I think that this is one of the reasons it's worth educating yourself about the profession now: So that you are thinking in terms of what kind of professional career you would like to have rather than just focusing on clearing the hurdles. Will this help you? I don't know, but I am applying my maxim that learning more about the profession can help one to carve out a sense of agency about career and professional matters.

Cell Phone Psycho

If you haven't seen this yet, it's worth checking out. It's probably fake, but deep down I hope that it is real. I showed it to my students on the first day of class to inform them about cell phone etiquette in the classroom. Fittingly, someone's phone started ringing while I was in the middle of directing them to the link on the Blackboard site. No one's phone has gone off since.

Favor

I think someone should post the url of this blog on the grad student LL conference. I'm not going to push this down anyone's throat (nice image, that), but I think I'm going to keep using this blog to link to interesting things and muse about the profession (more musing coming soon) -- and I hope you all will, too. (C'mon, post something!) But I have no idea how many people are even aware of it. Again, if they don't want to read it, fine by me.

Job Talk

Dr. Crazy has an interesting post about giving job talks. I would be interested in hearing whether or not faculty who have served on hiring committees agree with her thoughts on this matter. Putting together such a talk sounds really daunting to me.