Or at least being driven by a blogger engine. I got Wordpress running tonight. It’ll be a bit before I switch the blog over. I still have to redesign the template. But you can check out my humble beginnings at:

http://www.waking-dream.com/index.php

Wordpress is up and running. Cool beans, yo!

Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!

Thanks for the suggestions regarding the previous post. I’m still working out my response plan for tech gone bad.

The lack of posting has been due to a crazy week at RIT and outside. Much of my time has been eaten up with some grading that I was doing for the Database Publishing Course. I’ve also had a lot of meetings and lectures that I just couldn’t miss. Plus, its difficult to justify blogging when I’m still behind on pulling together my application. It’s clear that writing the teaching statement will be as much of an exercise in pulling teeth as the thesis was. Grrr… I really need to work on overcoming this writers block. Otherwise there will be bigger problems.

FYI - I’ve bitten the bullet and decided to switch the blog over to Wordpress. In theory the switch will go down next week. There may not be too many posts in the interim period.

Oh… and for those who are interested, the current GoogleAd’s revenue total is a whopping $0.20. I’m not sure where I’ll be spending it all. Though it does give me a slight wry pleasure knowing that the postage for the check will cost them more than the check itself. Not that have anything against Google… I just appreciate the humor in that situation.

Today, while attending a New Media Perspectives lecture, I discovered that the view from the last row of Webb Auditorium at RIT provides a sobering lesson for the budding teacher. From my vantage point I watched as student after student opted out of the lecture with the help of portable electronics. The student immediately in front of me spent most of his time watching anime episodes on his video iPod (just as an aside, I was totally blown away by it and want one). Ahead of him was another student hiding a Playstation Portable (PSP) behind his notebook (the oldest trick in the book). Around the classroom multiple students were checking e-mail and traversing the web on their laptops. In the interests of full disclosure, I have to cop to doing this once or twice while at the U of C. But I never spent an entire class alternating between playing Quake III and Madness Interactive, with an occasional break to watch Sealab:2021 episodes. A number of others resorted to using their cell phones to txt and play games.

I’m not sure how to react to this or take it into account in planning classes. The knee jerk extremes would be to either ban laptops (which is just plain dumb) or simply pretend that it shouldn’t happen (or even worse, won’t happen to me). I’m just not quite sure what the middle ground would be. Any thoughts about it?

I’ve started the process of pulling together my application packet for the full time position at the School of Print Media. For those not familiar with it, the academic application process differs in a number of ways from that of other jobs. Instead of a resume, I will be submitting my curriculum vitae (cv), a detailed account of my academic and professional history. I am also expected to submit two statements, essays that present my research interests and teaching philosophy. Each statement shouldn’t go much more than a page.

Right now, I’m deep into planning them out. I’ve been filling pages with notes about my personal beliefs on teaching and research. The latter, research, has been progressing far more smoothly. It hasn’t taken much time to refocus my media anthropology interests on the world of print and new media. Heck, it was pretty much there already; just replace sex-bots with Gutenberg.

The teaching statement on the other hand is vexing me. This is supposed to be a deeply personal document that lays out who I am and what separates my approach from others, not to mention what will make my approach effective. In theory, this would have been developed over a few years of TAing. Unfortunately, I don’t have that luxury, and I’m a little concerned about that. But trust me, that little detail isn’t going to stop this process. For the moment, I’m reading the wealth of online information about teaching philosophy statements. I think I’ve got the structural formula down. The next step will be to put a first draft together. I’m trying to accomplish that by Friday.

One of the fondest memories from my time as an undergraduate at RIT was being singled out and favorably compared to Ben Franklin during a School of Printing Event. I don’t think I was deserving of the honor, but it meant a lot. Franklin and I will be getting to know each other better in the months to come. In the meantime, happy 300th birthday, oh Patron Saint of Printing. Were you alive today, you’d be blogging, and far more eloquently than most out there. Certainly more so than I.

I just got back from the second lecture that I’ve attended since starting here at RIT. As part of my preparations for next quarter, I am sitting in on the classes I’ll be teaching in spring. Tonight was a really valuable experience. I got to experience what happens when a “smart” classroom turns dumb. The overhead projector refused to acknowledge the existence of the instructor’s laptop. While the teacher eventually emerged victorious, the ensuing hot man-on-computer wrasslin’ match was a sobering demonstration of how quickly technology problems can disrupt a class. The incident was in stark contrast to classes at the University of Chicago, where dry-erase markers are looked upon as unproven technology compared to tried and true chalk.

From this incident I learned to make sure to arrive early and test the equipment. In the instructor’s defense, his planned pre-flight was stymied because the preceding class ran over, providing him no prep time. Thus a secondary lesson is to expect the unexpected.

Beyond projector issues, I learned that I have managed to retain a lot of the fundamental printing knowledge that was instilled in me over a decade ago within these brick lined walls. Professor Hoff, where ever you are, I just want to say thank you. This means that I can spend much more prep time structuring the material, as opposed to relearning it. That said, the structuring will be no easy task. The goal of this course is to present a solid and relevant overview of the various printing processes and the printing industry. There is a large amount of interconnected information in there and my first order of business is to decide what’s essential and what order it should come in. An interrelated challenge is to appropriately set subject “depth,” ensuring that I avoid going to shallow or making students take too many drinks from the fire-hose.

Needless to say, I’m excited about meeting these challenges. I’m beginning to see how I can make a difference and how a new perspective will be useful.

Week 2 at RIT has kicked off with a slight update to the blog. I’m trying out “Ads by Google” and man, is it paying off! My understanding is that the google ad system dynamically chooses which ads to run by parsing the existing content of a web page. Because of this dynamic nature, I’m not sure if the same ad will be running by the time that you load this page, gentle reader. Therefore, I want to share what I got when I loaded this page for the first time:

It left me wondering exactly what it was in the previous postings that triggered a “homosexual dating” advert (not that there is anything wrong with that). How and why this happened is interesting to me for both the linguistic and dynamic publishing question it raises. So thats getting added to the list of research subjects to dive into.

Today is MLK day, and that brings up memories of my Social Psychology class at the U of C. The culmination of that class was a group research project I undertook with three other MAPers. The project tested how appearance can affect persuasion. In the experiement, volunteers were asked to read an article and respond to it. There were a number of article permiutations, each tweaked to test a part of our hypothesis. What connects this experiment to MLK day, and to my present surroundings, is that the articles were presented as editorials from the RIT’s Reporter Magazine. The mock editorials addressed whether or not classes should be held on MLK day. We chose the Reporter because like U of C, RIT is a quarter based institution and holds classes on MLK day. There’s more about the experiment, including pictures from the study, in this entry from last year.

Last night, I attended my first lab class. It marked my return to a pressroom floor, though admittedly a very different type of one than those I knew in the past. The class was held in the Digital Print Lab at RIT’s Center for Integrated Manufacturing Studies (CIMS).

This is the Kodak NexPress, a digital press that can be used for variable data printing. Variable data printing is a term used to refer to print jobs where each impression (printed page) is unique. No two pages printed by the NexPress need necessarily be the same (though the NexPress is more than capable of accurately printing the same page over and over again).

One variable data application for the NexPress is printing custom, personalized mailers. And that was the focus of this particular lab. Students were printing out personalized postcards addressed to customers of a fictitious camera supply store. Next quarter I’ll be teaching this lab as part of a course on Variable Data Printing.

Side notes

• The above lab is currently being taught by the man known to some of this blog’s readers as MoFo. Again, it’s a small, small, world.

• The pictures from the last two days were taken with my new cell phone, the Motorola e815. I have yet to blog about it, but I cannot sing the praises of this phone highly enough. While not as drop dead sexy as the Razrs, it is pound for pound and buck for buck one of the best phones out there (and far better than the currently available Razrs, too).