Thoughts on culture, education, and having been a Canadian in the US

There’s nothing to make a late evening of grading more enjoyable than coming across this story while doing a wee bit of websurfing on the side. I’m still smiling….

Found via the always interesting Huffington Post.

Well, it sounds like universities are signing up for iTunes U in droves, in Canada as well as in the US. Many people I talked to are enthused about the possibility, though many of us also have some reservations.

My colleague Richard Parent and I had an interesting chat the other day about whether or not universities will want us to lock up our content to make it exclusive to our students. I like the option of being able to have most content open to everyone and some closed to everyone but students in a particular course, but only so long as I am the sole person to decide which file is freely distributed and which is not.

The other concern many people have is Apple’s connection to all this. I’m an Apple fanatic, as most people know, so I am not all that bothered by this. But what if it were Dell, for instance, offering a solution that only synched automatically with their players?

No word on when (I won’t say “if”) UVM will be signing up. I figure that if I keep blogging about this, eventually it will happen.

This posting from Michael Feldstein’s e-Literate blog discusses some of the reasons that I’m excited about the imminent arrival of iTunes University at UVM. For me, this will be a perfect way of distributing content to my students. I’m not sure yet how I might use this to distribute copyrighted material to my TAP students next fall, but in any case they will all have iPods where they can receive anything new that I add. iTunes U will also provide the perfect way for the students to share with each other the podcasts they will be creating. I can’t wait!

Trust my friend and colleague Philip Baruth to have the most hilarious take on the Cheney quail hunting incident this past weekend. Philip’s dead-on as usual.

If you’ve not checked out Vermont Daily Briefing yet, it’s well worth adding to your list of daily sites to visit. There’s even a bit of Canadian content there from time-to-time!

Thanks to the always interesting MoorishGirl blog, I came across this article by Margaret Atwood in Sunday’s Washington Post. Atwood talks about her experiences last summer teaching writing in a two-week camp for young Inuit women. Her description of the camp on Southhampton Island, an “island is as large as Switzerland and has one settlement, which is home to fewer than a thousand people” is fascinating. Even more interesting, though, is the question that emerges for Atwood as a way to connect writing with the forms of traditional knowledge the women are learning at the camp:

Sheree [Fitch] and I, the writing instructors, faced a difficult task. Sheree told me these women might be afraid of writing because of negative experiences at school or they just might not see the use of doing it at all. We also knew that the standard approach for college courses — plumbing the depths of the inner you and so forth — would not be very effective in a culture that places sharing well above self-regard. But this sewing question — “Who’s it for?” — gave us a way in.

During our first session, we said that writing, like sewing, took one thing and made it into another; and that writing, like sewing, was always for someone, even if that someone was yourself in the future. Writing was a way of sending your voice to someone you might never meet.

The Post website also indicates that Margaret Atwood will be online on the Post website tomorrow (Feb 14th) at 3pm to answer questions about this project and her work. Further details can be found here. Sounds like it will be a great discussion!

Terry Teachout‘s WSJ article about the upcoming Sony Reader and what this might mean to reading and publishing renews my enthusiasm about having an ebook reader that’s separate from my computer. For one thing, having most everything I need with me at all times would be great. I’ve got a zillion academic books that I’d prefer to have in digital form, which would save shelf space for all my different editions of Ulysses. 🙂

I can also see subscribing to magazines that way in the same way I now subscribe to podcasts. Wired has also just published a good article on the Reader, with a few pictures. Am looking forward to holding one of these in my hand.

Hmmmm… it seems like Mac users will be left out in the cold with this device. I wonder if Steve Jobs has something even better up his sleeve or if Sony is going to do anything to accomodate Mac users. 🙁

I just finished a posting on my English 005 blog about an entry I came across on the blog of James Moore, one of the Members of Parliament we met with in October on our class trip to Ottawa. Moore was one of four MPs who took over an hour to meet with us and answer students questions. Obviously, it made an impression on Moore who is even younger than I am and one of the bright lights I saw from the Conservative Party while we were there.

My students were blown away, really, that four members of parliament would take time out of their schedules to meet with us. The students came away with a great impression of how the Canadian legislative system works.

Teaching Carnival V is now online here.

These regular Teaching Carnivals are an excellent resource and a great example of how blogging can help us to have meaningful conversations about what we do with people outside of our own institutions.

Technorati Tags: Academia

I’m just about to send in my mail-in ballot for Canada’s upcoming federal election, hoping that it will arrive in time. Not that my vote usually makes a difference in Conservative Alberta, the domain of King Ralph for the last 14 years (!). Nevertheless, the latest polls suggesting that Stephen Harper and the Conservative Party will form the next government in Canada have me very concerned.

Watching this all from Vermont, where practically everyone I know wishes their own federal government were pro-Kyoto, pro-same-sex-marriage, pro-public healthcare, and against the war in Iraq, it’s all a bit surreal to think that we’re seemingly about to elect a that has argued the opposite position over and over again. I would be one of the last people to argue that the Liberals have been a shining example of a great vision for the future of Canada, but things like the less discussed aspects of the Conservative platform and the potential for the “shining lights” of the Conservative party to form the next federal cabinet are, needless to say, very worrisome to many of us. Let’s hope that if Harper does win, it’s not a majority.

After opening a mere five months ago, Québec’s amazing new Bibliothèque nationale will soon have had more than two million visitors. I’ve been eager to go for some time, but hopefully should have some more time to get up there this spring to explore. Being so close to Montréal is one of the many great perks of living here in Vermont.

Source: CBC Arts: Quebec mega-library set to welcome 2-millionth visitor: