If only I had something like this while working on the dissertation!

... "We here at Mead understand that as students get older and wiser, they need notebooks with increasingly narrow lines," Mead CEO John A. Luke told reporters. "In college, people are at a stage in their education where they require 9/32nds of an inch between each line, which is why we make college-ruled notebooks. But I think we can all agree that grad school is a completely different world than college: a world where 9/32nds of an inch is simply too much room."..."How can we expect graduate students to learn to gather information and construct knowledge independently within their specialized field of study using college-ruled notebooks?" he added. "These students need a narrower-lined notebook, and at long last, they have it."..."Just think: If you are writing a dissertation on elements of thanatopsis and necromimesis as they relate to cacaesthesian themes of mid-20th-century Irish literature, do you really want your notebook lines to be more than seven millimeters apart?" Luke said. "Of course not."..."Gone are the days of graduate students having to tediously pencil in new lines between each existing college-ruled line just to make the notebooks usable," the press release read in part. "And with the time you'll save by not having to flip a page every 33 lines, you could earn your Ph.D. a year early." (The Onion)

In the spring I will again be teaching a class on conflict management. More than one colleague has expressed puzzlement as to why I would teach this class, but I really enjoy it. While I, and a few students, might enjoy discussions on the historical nuances of technology or reference works, conflict management is relevant to everyone -- and I do get to discuss Wikipedia NPOV and good faith! I have developed two exercises for understanding cognitive priming on cooperation/competition (i.e., prisoners dilemma) and integrative bargaining that might be of use to others.

I find "giving" grades as a teacher to be as troublesome as getting them when I was a student. Alfie Kohn (1999) in his book Punished by Rewards: The Trouble with Gold Stars, Incentive Plans, A's, Praise, and Other Bribes argues, based on solid research, that rewards, such as grades, often undermine intrinsic motivation (p. 148), which is key to a substantive long-term learning. This counterproductive practice persists because our educational system attempts to do two things that are often at odds with one another: facilitating learning and sorting students (p. 202). I've seen this in my own classroom. Some of the brightest students, and no doubt the most consistent "performers," have expressed a strong distaste for open ended assignments. Asking them to propose a topic that interests them is far too frightening relative to the more remedial types of tasks they have clearly mastered. As Kohn notes, "when we are working for reward, we do exactly what is necessary and no more" (p. 63); this isn't necessarily because of laziness, it also avoids the risk of hurting one's GPA. On the flipside I've seen students with a lot of potential but also significant challenges (perhaps English isn't their first language, their previous education wasn't as rigorous, illness, financial constraints, etc.) become demoralized with a poor grade. Few things are as frustrating as seeing motivated students and a positive classroom culture taking hits because of grades. Nor do I want to be in that position of judging students' circumstances: perhaps Solomon could fairly judge between genuine illness, family emergency, forced overtime, or a hangover -- but I can't.

I'm not completely comfortable with my present approach, perhaps one day I will become an "easy" grader and submit all "A"s except for the most obviously negligent, but this is what I work with now: explicit criteria and early feedback.

According to the standards of my department, which are quite useful and comprehensive, an "A" is a reflection of an "An Outstanding Student" whose "Writing demonstrates impressive understanding of readings, discussions, themes and ideas. Written work is fluid, clear, analytical, well-organized and grammatically polished. Reasoning and logic are well-grounded and examples precise." My present understanding of an "A" is also informed by my experience as a Ph.D. student. I expect I've been a bit of a "grade grubber" myself, though fortunately willing to take risks to pursue my interests. One of my greatest disappointments in my nearly 10 years of classes, but not my lowest grade, was an "A-" in a historical methods course. I loved the course, adored the professor, and invested a lot of myself in the research and final paper. But at the outset the professor said he only gave an "A" to those papers he could see being accepted for publication and he was true to his word. After a few days I could admit to myself that my paper was not yet at that level, my research and thinking weren't developed enough yet, and I learned I was not alone -- in fact I was in the vast majority. (It's a sad truth of how we can feel better or worse about ourselves through comparison with others! A colleague of mine once cynically captured this with a sentiment that, "every time a friend of mine succeeds I die a little inside.")

In any case, I use a similar threshold in undergraduate classes. I don't "give" grades, I evaluate performance according to the departmental criteria. I don't grade on a curve, but I do make sure my expectations are reasonable by first reviewing the range of performance. An "A" is truly outstanding, something I could use as an exemplar in future courses or even recommend to someone interested in the topic. An "A-" fell little short and could be a "A" with a few small tweaks. A "B" is a reflection of good work, a "C" of "fair" work. I do want to be humane, some professors have cut me slack in the past, but also fair. It is not at all uncommon that at the end of the semester when I'm porting grades from my spreadsheet to the bubbles of the Scantron to want to bump a grade, but I fear this may be favoritism, so I don't.

Grading sucks, but it's a requirement of the job, and I am not sure of what the alternatives would be.

Given a wretched experience with using Microsoft Word for my Masters thesis 10 years ago, I decided to try LaTeX this time around. One might think that Microsoft Word has improved, but my tinkering has shown it is still quite dangerous. Word's notions of styles are extremely frustrating, and have changed over time. Additionally, creating multi-document files, or very large files risks corruption. Furthermore, given I work in an interdisciplinary space, it is useful to be able to format a document, including footnotes and bibliography, as, say, either historical or sociological: LaTeX is quite good at this.

That said, LaTeX is a pain. Granted, I prefer a simple structured text markup language over a corruptible proprietary binary blob, but LaTeX is like the Perl of markup languages, and I am a Python guy. (To be fair, TeX and LaTeX are now decades old.) No doubt, regardless of what you want to do, there is a way to do it in LaTeX. The problem is, like Perl, there are too many ways to do it. There are dozens of packages that appeared to do the same thing, though many are different enough to make you wonder why the difference is important. It is difficult to discern the present best practices and most of the documentation is in annoying PDF. Even understanding LaTeX syntax is a confounding task. Does '[]' mean an optional parameter to a command? Mostly yes, but sometimes no. The only way I could get a handle on the world of LaTeX was to purchase Tex for the Impatient and The LaTeX Companion.

In any case, when I do have a problem the LaTeX community on comp.text.tex is extremely helpful. So even though there is a steep learning curve, when I ascend a particular hill, that challenge stays behind me. There is no equivalent to Microsoft Word kicking me down the mountain.

Like all colleges, Steinhardt has a particular format they require for doctoral dissertations. Unfortunately, its specification is sometimes ambiguous, and more a creature of typewriting, than computer typesetting. (For example, section headings are supposed to be underlined!) In any case, I thought I would share the fruits of my frustrations: steinhard-pkg-opts.tex. I haven't yet received approval that this is sufficient, nor am I an expert in LaTeX, but, should someone else at Steinhardt need such a thing, this might be a start.

Recently two short essays, which started out as blog entries here, have been published in collections that might be of interest to readers. In Re-public's Wiki politics - part I, I'm hoping Yanis Varoufakis can tell us more about the actual practice of democracy in ancient Greece compared to present day Wikipedia governance. In addition to my NYU colleague Alex Galloway, I particularly recommend Felix Stalder's work from In the Shade of the Commons -Towards a Culture of Open Networks.

Longtime readers will know I've been frequently frustrated and puzzled by NYU's infrastructural choices. When I first arrived I learned they used my SSN as my student identification. I protested, wrote a formal letter, and was eventually issued a new SSN-like number. But, of course, this didn't easily propagate through the institution so there were often mismatches, duplication, and confusion when I used the computer labs, athletic, library, health, and insurance services. Eventually, this policy blew up in their face when students' SSNs were accidentally released and all students were issued a new, proper, identification. But this meant that for a period, I had to remember three different numbers!

Other poor choices of NYU: an inefficient library site, an inaccessible and proprietary classroom management system (i.e. blackboard), a broken student registration site (e.g., "don't use the back button", and "it works in Internet Explorer"), blocking the SSH port so I can't securely use their network, requiring a proprietary client for their wireless network (for which there's no "support" for Linux and Palm), etc.

The latest head-scratcher is an announcement that we must use their new electronic billing system. Clicking on a URL in the e-mail announcement, I was redirected to what appeared to be a Sallie Mae site with an NYU logo. I immediately think this feels an awful lot like a phishing attack. (I frequently receive advertisements from spammers, who know I am a student, to my unpublished NYU e-mail address, so some how even this leaked out!) And even if this isn't a phishing attack, Sallie Mae is the last company I want to have any dealings with: their slimy marketing and brutal collection practices are widely criticized; NYU's announcement came just before Sallie Mae's sweetheart payoffs to university officials became headline news!

After I e-mailed NYU about the security and privacy practices of the service, I learned I can "petition" to opt out after I fill out more paperwork. NYU... man...!

The Blogosphere has been abuzz about a history department's policy restricting students from citing Wikipedia. I'm not fond of this position, as I explained last year, and I thought I'd share the "best practice" I encourage in my students.

I have just completed revising the syllabus for of course I will be again teaching in the spring of 2007: Understanding how we understand: technological predictions, myths, and implications. Pedagogically, the class is very much influenced by Brookfield and Presskill (1999), Discussion as a way of teaching: tools and techniques for democratic classrooms.

Now that my proposal is done, I'm looking forward to the actual dissertation. (I really enjoyed writing my Master's thesis.) However, that doesn't mean I look upon the project without concern. One concern is with the form of the dissertation (as a genre) and interdisciplinary work. In the proposal, beyond the actual research questions and methods, the text was not as focused as it might've been as I was not reporting findings, proposing a theory, telling a story, or making an argument -- beyond that the concepts covered were important to me. (I was thinking that I have conveyed my findings, written stories, and made arguments in existing work and will do so more completely in the dissertation.) Fortunately, the proposal is done, but I want to make sure the dissertation doesn't feel the same way. This raises a number of questions from the secondary literature.

First, I have not yet chosen a "discipline." Beyond a focus on collaboration and technology I feel I could be writing to new media, organizational studies, communication, or STS scholars. I'm happy to pull from a diverse set of disciplines -- look at my committee -- but it can also create some challenges.

Second, my two inspirations don't make much use of secondary literature. Sheeran simply dropped the theoretical argument he made in his dissertation from his book -- with no loss in my humble opinion. Morton was writing a history and employed primary sources in order to tell his story and make his argument. I will be doing much the same, but I want to be informed and employ (diverse) social science and theory where appropriate. Popular press social science books do this sort of thing (e.g., Jared Diamond, Robert Wright, Malcolm Gladwell etc.) but these are not historical works either.

So, I am not confident in the style in which I will be writing. I haven't yet been struck with a great example in this disciplinary style/literature; Siva's work is close and perhaps my issue is related to those he raises in his recent piece on "Critical Information Studies." (Though my concern with "critical" studies is present even there: I believe it is important to go beyond pejorative critique and recognize -- and even contribute to -- things we might find to be good. Though, of course, we need to be open to the phenomenon, and as scholars, like to find surprises and novelty.)

As a student this time around -- more so than my experiences in computer science and policy -- I find that the process of getting feedback includes a deluge of references. In my present interdisciplinary domain of humanities and social science it seems there are many traditions making a claim upon a subject via their own literatures. Consequently, feedback in the form of "you should read X" can be overwhelming. One skill of a scholar is to learn to be open to such feedback while separating the wheat from the chaff. This is not to say that some recommendations are not welcome, but some are better suited to the purpose at hand than others.

Consequently, when I give feedback to colleagues I try to avoid the imperious "you should read X" or the possibly insulting "have you read X?" and try to cast my comment as "I think the notion of Y in X will help you with your subject in the following way..."

A colleague of mine inspired this maxim in her own guidelines for a reading group this past semester and the more I collaborate with others, the more I like it.