Friday, 19 September 2003
my computer, my self
Jill Walker has a great entry about a quote from Shelly Jackson’s book Patchwork Girl. (Which I’m going to have to read…)
If you think you’re going to follow me, you’ll have to learn to move the way I do, think the way I think; there’s just no way around it. And then you’ll have trouble telling me apart from yourself.
Jill says, and I agree, that “that’s what computers do. Technology. Pens, too, for that matter.”
they like me! they really like me!
Was talking to my mother last night. She teaches in the Language and Literature department at RIT, so it’s not unusual for us to have some of the same students—sometimes at the same time, but more often during different quarters.
She used to teach at a local community college, where she once had a student who’d left RIT after his teachers had apparently failed to recognize his skills and talents. In the compare-and-contrast essay that her students wrote that semester, this person compared the worst teacher he’d ever had with the best. The best, of course, was my mother. The worst…well, while the person wasn’t named, my mother realized after reading it, and discussing it with the student, that it was me. (My mother and I don’t share a last name, nor are we similar in appearance, so he’d have had no way of knowing about the connection.)
In a remarkable display of professional ethics, my mother never told me who the student was, and never told the student who I was. But the incident stuck with us both, and we now regularly tell the story to our students at the beginning of a quarter, so that none of them unwittingly make the same mistake.
At any rate, I was talking to her last night, and she mentioned that she had a student this quarter who’d had me for a class last year. And that when the student found out about the relationship, she stopped my mother after class to talk about how much she’d loved my class. In fact, my mother said, the student said that it was the best class she’d taken here at RIT.
I know, I know, this is a shameless, self-promoting, boastful post. But I’ve posted a lot lately about things that that I’m not happy about…seemed like it made sense to share something that made me happy.
amazingly useful site for academics
My colleague Tona Henderson introduced me to an amazingly helpful site this quarter. It’s called Papersinvited, and it collects calls for papers from conferences and journals worldwide.
When you register, you create a profile and tell the system what topic areas you’re interested in following. In addition to the existing topical categories (I subscribe to “Library and Information Sciences,” “Knowledge Management,” “Communication,” “Digital Arts,” and “Internet and Online Services”), you can specify up to five keywords to look for in announcements (I have “weblogs,” “blogs,” “social software,” “gender,” and “women”).
Each time you log in, it shows you current announcements in the areas you’ve selected. You can delete them if you’re not interested, or add them to a planner, which is a calendar that shows you upcoming submission dates, notification dates, and conference dates.
I don’t know why it’s free, but it is. And it’s incredibly useful to those of us who are under various pressures to publish and present in peer-reviewed contexts.
