Updated Technology Policy

As I have done in the past, this year I formed a student committee to work with me in rewriting some of my classroom policies. This year, I decided that my technology policy, even though only a few years old, needed to be amended, updated, and changed in various ways. With the help of my student committee Nicole Cammarota, Meghan McCallister, Lauren Graham, and Matthew Shoppas, we met once in person and then edited a shared Google Doc. After some editing on my part, this is what I ended up with:

Technology Policy
Please mute your cell phone BEFORE entering the classroom. If your cell phone goes off more than once while class is in a session, you will be asked to leave. I fully encourage whatever technology suites your learning style, accommodations, or interests whether they are laptops, tablets, apps on smart phones, etc, as long as they do not distract from our purpose in the classroom. Paper is totally fine too.

With that being said, during opening and closing remarks in class focus should be away from technology and on discussing our goals and outcomes for the day. Please remove all ear buds before entering class and keep them removed until you leave the room at the end of class.

In my classes, I have an expectation students will have access to email and computers in general. All of your work will be submitted to via your BCC Gmail account and returned, with annotated comments, via Google Drive. Given there are public and school libraries, the ILRC, coffee shops, etc, students need to budget their time better; I do not see any excuse for having “no access” to email outside of the classroom.

Students are expected to check their BCC Gmail account on a regular basis. I do not accept the excuse, “I didn't check my email for two weeks” as a valid problem. Digital correspondence should be written using proper grammar and form. I will not reply to emails filled with texting speak (2, u, 4, lol, j/k) or poor grammar and/or misspellings.

Please include a subject and "sign" your email with your name, student ID number, and course section. If you miss class, please check the syllabus for information about assignments, due dates, and outcomes from class. Do not email the professor and ask “did we do anything in class today?” or any variations on that theme.

Ubuntu One

While Spideroak is my go-to for deeper and more long term offsite backup, for quickly moving things between computers, or to my phone or tablet, I have been looking for a replacement for Dropbox since the revelations that their cloud service is not exactly the most secure out there. I think I have found a good solution in Ubuntu One, which is built into the Ubuntu OS.

Ubuntu One runs very similarly to Dropbox. You can choose what folders you want synced and they will be viewable on all devices you have the app installed. I find Ubuntu One to be very fast and works smoothly on both the desktop and phone. My primary uses for Ubuntu One are twofold. First to move files to my phone, since the Galaxy S3 that does not allow access on Linux computers for some reason (oh, I know: Google wants you to use their Music Cloud service. No thanks). Second, I use it for moving files from my day to day use laptop over to my desktop where I can print things or to my work computer, which I do not do that often.

Ubuntu One is a sold Dropbox replacemant. I can see myself getting a lot of use out of it in the future.

Back To School Linux Applications

As far as I know, I am one of the few, if only, Linux users in the faculty on my campus. This comes up from time to time, often when someone walks by my laptop and doesn't see the usual Apple/Windows interface. I have discussed Linux with some of my colleagues; many are interested in how I do the things I do with it for school.

This is a list of Back To School apps for faculty who use Linux. I use each of these on a day to day basis and I would not be as productive as I am without them. Good news for Windows/Apple users: Many of these are cross-platform applications you can use too.

Tomboy: Tomboy is my note taking program of choice. I have a variety of uses for Tomboy: I keep a "to do" list that also loads on Conky (see below) plus numerous notes for each day of the week, ideas for projects, and other assorted randomness. The biggest use as a faculty member for me is having portable notes with lists. I have a pre, and post, semester list. I have a running list of things that need to be added to my annual report. In the summer, I draft and map my classes for the year via Tomboy notes. Tomboy can be synced over a number of computers via the cloud or, what I do, by syncing the folder my notes are in over a number of computers using Spideroak (look down).

Spideroak: I moved to Spideroak about a year ago after issues with a few of their competitors. Spideroak is an extremely secure backup program (see the Security Now! podcast episode about it) that backs up your work and can be synced over a number of devices. It is also cross-platform. I use Spideroak on my home desktop (Linux Mint 15), the laptop I bring to work (Ubuntu 12.04), another laptop running Ubuntu 11.10, and my Android phone and tablet. I can also access it via the web on my office desktop (which I run using Portable Apps...see below) One caveat: You cannot upload files to your Spideroak archive from the web ala Dropbox. I have been told by someone at Spideroak this is for security reasons.

Calibre: Calibre is an ebook manager that can also swap your books between various formats. Depending on your ebook reader, you may want books in .mobi, .ebook, or PDF (I had a student this summer who had a Nook, I think, and wanted everything in PDF) or a multitude of other format options. Calibre lets you transfer between these formats with relative ease to keep up with wherever your books are going.

Conky: Conky is a lightweight system monitor that allows a user to visually display information from their computer. As I said above, I use Conky to display my task list from Tomboy. I also display a monthly calendar, my daily Google Calendar, and various information about what is going on within my computer (CPU. Memory, What Song is Currently Playing). Conky is fairly easy to set up, UbuntuForums have a number of tutorials that users have created, although you don’t have to be a user of Ubuntu (personally I run Linux Mint for the most part) to use them.

LibreOffice: LibreOffice is a great alternative to Microsoft Office that I use on a day to day basis. Many of my students, not willing to put down the amount of money Microsoft wants for their products, also use LibreOffice. LibreOffice allows users to create documents, presentations, spreadsheets, etc. I have used various forks from this project for about 10 years and have never looked back at Office. It’s not perfect, but good enough for me.

Portable Apps: While not Linuxcentric, I use Portable Apps on my work computer a lot to make sure I can use the programs I want. I do trust my IT Department and like them a lot, but I am not that interested in using Microsoft Office or Internet Explorer. I carry a flash drive in my bag with Google Chrome, LibreOffice, and a handful of other programs. I also run HTTPSEverywhere in Chrome to make sure my connections are secure on our Wi-Fi Network.

Linux Boot Drive: Even if you are not a Linux user, I think every academic should have a copy of some form of Linux on a flash drive or CDR. Most forms of Linux allow you to run a "live" version of the OS before you install it. Normally, users would use this to test compatibility and make sure hardware and drivers (I had a laptop years ago that had problem with the rather infamous Broadcom wireless cards) work in Linux. However, this can also be used to, potentially, recover files from a broken Windows system. Say your Windows XP laptop crashes. Depending on how your OS failed, there is a decent chance your files are fine. Booting into Linux could allow you to recover your files before reinstalling. Of course, this is why you should be backing up (see above).

Office Hours For The Fall

Our new semester begins tomorrow. Here are my office hours:

Monday: 1030am-1130am Laurel Hall 114

Tuesday/Thursday 2pm-3pm Parker 413B

Wednesday/Friday 1130am-1230pm Laurel Hall 114 

Of course, I am available by appointment and can be found via txt, email, or tweet as well.

Establishment Media Sneers At Edward Snowden's Education: A Primer In Elitism & Snobbery

As the PRISM leaks scandal broke, I very quickly moved from disgust and outrage at the revelations from Snowden's leaks to a much more focused anger on some of the reactions to him. Particularly, I began to focus on how Snowden's education, or "lack" thereof, was used as a talking point to attack him. Conservative writer David Brooks inferred, as FAIR points out, that Snowden could not be "civil" without a college education. Roger Simon from Politico, who have been horrible during this scandal, also argued that Snowden was only qualified to be a grocery clerk. Simon also called him a "slacker," which I didn't realize in 2013 was still a thing. The talking point smear "high school dropout" was continued, as FAIR documents in the above article, by all major establishment news networks in their mindless reporting.

Why does Snowden's education matter at all? What a bunch of elitist nonsense. Sorry, not everyone goes to college and nor should they! A good friend of mine is a high school dropout and, like Snowden, she ended up in a job where she makes six figures and lives quite an affluent lifestyle. As Kristen Powers points out, if only Snowden had gone to Yale or Harvard like our last few presidents, who have done *such* a fantastic job of taking our rights, torturing, destroying women's agency, spying on us, and now murdering citizens without trial. Sounds to me like they are the real "losers," but you will never hear that from establishment media types.

Sounds like we would be a hell of a lot better off with a high school drop out running things than some War Pig from an Ivy. 

Establishment attacks also went after Snowden's age. Dave Weigel from MSNBC posted a disgusting tweet on July 2nd that Snowden was the best reason yet to "ban millennials."

Coming off the back of a Time Magazine cover bashing millennials in April, I have to wonder what establishment media have against young people? Are they not conforming to your bullshit enough? I love my millennial students and would take their thoughts and feelings long before some smug elitist from an Obama Administration propaganda outlet like MSNBC. They have creative ideas for changing the word and want something better than what the establishment gives them. But hey they are just community college students ha-ha-ha lol, teheehehe. This is probably, rightfully so, why millennials feel less "patriotic" than previous generations too. Why be proud of a country that kicks you in the ribs no matter what you do?

Feminisms

At BCC this spring, we had a nice panel discussion about Feminism(s) with my colleague Erika Baldt and awesome new Dean Nichole Bennett-Bealer. It was a nice discussion that was very broad in its topics. At one point the topic of men and feminism came up. I have for many years openly proclaimed my discomfort with men labelling themselves as "feminists." There are many power/privilege issues with that label and I think men have a different role to play in this process. This got argued around the room, with some people really not understanding what I was getting at, which was no fault of their own as I think many of them had not ever consider the point.

I tried to point out that men need to take a more supportive role in this process that does not center them, but I am not sure if I was totally eloquent about it. What I was trying to say can be summarized by this fantastic quote I found on Tumblr (and had retumbled and could not find during the panel):

Men who want to be feminist allies do not need to be given a space in feminism.  They need to take the space that they have in society and make it feminist.  That’s what women had to do in the first place, and women have fought much too hard for what little space they have to be giving it to men.

Teachers Need A Deputy

One of the big lessons I learned this school year was that an effective teacher needs a deputy in the classroom. I had never thought about this before until I was watching a Champion's League soccer match during the spring. One of the commentators began discussing one of the teams in the match's game that weekend. Their star goalie had been injured, but the commentator noted "he has a really good deputy behind him, which is very important" or something like that.

As I sat there watching the match, I got to thinking about how that related to the classroom. I realized after a few minutes that a lot of my best classes while teaching were the ones where I had a student I could rely on as a sort of "deputy" in the classroom. My first semester at BCC, I taught three classes. The morning class was decent, but took a lot of work on my part to really get the class going by the end. However, my afternoon classes both did really well and I think one of the reasons was that I had a good student deputy in both classes.

In the noon class, a Composition I, I did not have one until around the middle of November, but it eventually happened. A young lady who did well in the class, but had been stuck with a bunch of high school friends that dragged her down a bit (I am sure we all see this all the time unfortunately). She suddenly made a strong break with them  and really took the initiative to not only perform better, but also help me and other students. At our peer reviews, she moved around the room like a second teacher aiding students I had not gotten to yet.

My class after that, a Composition II, had a student deputy from the first day on. There were some issues with student concerns along the way and she was able to check in with them, report her findings back to me, and then I could implement changes to the class. I would have had a more harder time with my first semester without these students.

This year I had a good deputy in almost every one of my classes that worked well. Without realizing it, I look for this kind of student leadership unconsciously. In the future, I will more actively seek it out and guide other professors who come to me looking for advice to do the same.