Serendipities

Have you heard about Blackle? I hadn’t, a friend told me about it yesterday. It’s a black, energy-saving version of Google. Apparently, a black screen uses less energy than a white, and every time you use Blackle instead of Google, you help the environment. At least, that’s the theory:

In January 2007 a blog post titled Black Google Would Save 750 Megawatt-hours a Year proposed the theory that a black version of the Google search engine would save a fair bit of energy due to the popularity of the search engine. Since then there has been skepticism about the significance of the energy savings that can be achieved and the cost in terms of readability of black web pages.

We believe that there is value in the concept because even if the energy savings are small, they all add up. Secondly we feel that seeing Blackle every time we load our web browser reminds us that we need to keep taking small steps to save energy.

I just made Blackle my default search engine (if you use that nifty google bar in Firefox, here’s where you can add Blackle).

I made a course blog for the Theories of Gender and Culture course - it’s still under construction, but here it is. Update: the blog has now gone into stealth mode - only registered students can read and contribute.

I had a really good meeting with our technology-and-education person Yolande Spoelder yesterday. She made me think about the didactic side of the blog - how am I going to use it in teaching — and had all kinds of useful questions and advice. First a bit on the technical side of things, more on the didactics below.

We decided to use the Edublogs site that Dave pointed out in the comments to my previous post. I could have installed a Wordpress Multi-user blog on my own server space, but the edublogs.org URL just sounds better than an earmarks.org one, and - to be honest - I was a little worried that I might accidentally install the MU blog over Serendipities. There, I said it, I’m a weasel.

The edublogs system works really well. You register, name your blog, and you’re done. Students register as users on the edublogs site and then you can add them to your blog as subscriber/author/editor. The only disadvantage I discovered so far, is that you cannot fiddle with your theme. You have to choose one of the themes on offer — there are 85 themes to pick from, so that is not a real problem. But then, if there is something you would just like to tweak a little, you can’t. There’s no access to the templates, only the standard theme options to choose from. Which is just as well, perhaps, because otherwise I would spend to much time fiddling.

I went for the Fauna theme at first, but then discovered that it does not show the names of post authors. I consider that a problem on a multi-user blog. I posted a query on the edublogs support forum, and got an immediate reply — so their support system is good as well. That didn’t solve the problem yet, though, so for the time being I switched to the Regulus theme, which Yolande discovered does show author names.

I wrote an initial post to introduce students to the workings of the blog, but after talking to Yolande yesterday, I know I will have to do more thinking on the ways in which I can make the blog work in the learning process. I’m still working on the course content, but it’s time to make that step to the didactic forms I will be using during the course. Here are some of the things I need to think about:

• (How) will the blog postings be graded?
• Do I want students to reflect on their progress in their postings?
• How do I ensure a lively discussion on the blog? A clear set of rules could create a straightforward context, but perhaps it could also formalize things too much? Perhaps the atmosphere during the seminars is also a major factor in the success of the blog.
• Will I/the class give feedback on students’ writing as well as on the content of their analyses, if one of my aims is to get students to practice their writing skills? And how would that work?

Yolande had some great ideas, based on her experience with the use of Wiki’s in education at the Vrije Universiteit. You could, for example, open with a broad question on how students would define sex and gender and their relation to literary criticism, and use the answers in class to explore their ideas. Then, at the end of the semester, after having read all the theory, I could come back to that question, and ask students to reflect in a post on how their ideas changed during the course. I think that would work really well.

Another suggestion she made, was to integrate the blog into the writing of the final essay for the course. Students could post their outline, or their introduction, so that other students could give feedback on their work. Those posts would have a clear goal: to improve their final essay, and it would give the blog a clear function in the process.

Lots to think about still, but at least the course blog is there now, waiting for input!

An article from The Observer on The Guardian website confirms what we perhaps all knew already: “Employees are becoming tired, frustrated and unproductive after constantly monitoring the electronic messages that keep interrupting them as they try to concentrate at work.” The research that this article is based on was carried out among academics and people in creative jobs. People were asked how often they thought they switched applications to look at their mail, and were then monitored to see how often they really did so — much more frequently than they themselves had thought.

The problem is that when you go back to what you were doing, you’ve lost your chain of thought and, of course, you are less productive. People’s brains get tired from breaking off from something every few minutes to check emails. [...] Workers in creative occupations or jobs involving periods of concentration focusing on getting an important project finished - such as academics, writers, architects and journalists - were likely to be worst affected, she said, while those in call centres for whom constant emails were integral to their work would not have the same problem.

Perhaps this academic year I should really start to check my mail only twice a day, and switch off the mail program when I’m writing or reading. I’ve said this to myself before, but I’m just too curious to be able to stick to this idea for more than a day or so.

How often do you check your mail?

Eek! What happened to my Library thing? Do you all see huge images of covers, too? I didn’t change a thing, and the script in my theme is still set to display “small” covers… I hope this will go away by itself in the course of the night.

Update: it did.

Lots of nice things today: Scribblingwoman is back at Scribblingwoman2! And she has this cool snapshot function on her new blog. I just had to download the plugin too.

If it so happens that you find yourself annoyed by these things creeping out of the woodwork every time you mouse over a link, I think you can disable them by clicking on the options button (top right).

Our house is now officially decluttered. It took two weeks, but bit by bit, room by room (well, we have only two rooms, really — but I did the bathroom, too) and closet by closet, we have thrown out all the unnecessary “stuff” that accumulated during the last two semesters and cluttered our home. I even did what New Kid did. It feels great. The only thing to do now is to contain the urge to buy new books to clutter the neatly organized bookshelves. I don’t have the room to do what The Little Professor did this summer…

Here are some inspiring sites:

• Unclutterer: a blog about getting and staying organized
• Oprah says it too: this is the year to declutter your life…
• Zenhabits: how to declutter
• Flylady: how to declutter
• No, there’s even an Amazon customer community devoted to decluttering!

Via The Long Eighteenth: Tenured Radical’s Six Pieces of Random Advice for the Novice Teacher. A great post to get back into teaching mode, with lots more pieces of useful random advice in the comments.