Sunday, July 06, 2008

Choice Quote: Bousquet #4

This post continues the thread of choice quotes from Marc Bousquet’s How the University Works.

From “The Informal Economy of the ‘Information University’” (63):

As with other forms of consumerist enjoyment, flex-timers generally pay for the chance to work—buying subscriptions to keep up, writing tuition checks, donating time to internships and unpaid training, flying themselves to professional development opportunities—in all respects shouldering the expense of maintaining themselves in constant readiness for their right to work to be activated by the management keystroke.  Contrary to the fantasy of the sedentary knowledge worker who telecommutes and never leaves home, the actual flex-timer is in constant motion, driving from workplace to workplace, from training seminar to daycare, grocery store, and gym, maintaining an ever more strenuous existence in order to present the working body required by capital: healthy, childless, trained, and alert, displaying an affect of pride in representing zero drain on the corporation’s resources.

Thursday, July 03, 2008

Free Video Editing Applications

If you work with video, or if you are considering working with video, you know that software and editing applications run the range from free to a bottomless pit of money.  Before you go invest in some software, consider trying out some of the free video editing applications listed here by Web Worker Daily.

Wednesday, July 02, 2008

Choice Quotes: Joe Berry #4

This post continues the thread of choice quotes from Joe Berry’s Reclaiming the Ivory Tower.

From “Getting Down to Work” (130):

Someone much smarter than I, when confronted with a complicated task of social analysis, said, “For a start, follow the money.” Start by looking at the institution’s income sources—taxes, government student aid, tuition and fees, grants of various sorts, sales of items or services, loans, sale of stock (if a for-profit institution), and contributions from alumni and others.  Then look at who controls the cash and how it is spent.  If your institutions is tuition-driven and has to actively recruit students in a competitive market, this suggests tactics that might be useful to pressure them.  But, if it is a public institution, with an elected board, dependent on funding from various public sources, then that suggests other avenues to explore.  Finding out who actually holds the power in the institution and over its budget and policies helps with strategic planning.

Monday, June 30, 2008

Choice Quote: Bousquet #3

This post continues the thread of choice quotes from Marc Bousquet’s How the University Works.

From “Introduction” (44):

Late capitalism doesn’t just happen to the university; the university makes late capitalism happen.  The flexible faculty are just one dimension of an informationalized higher ed—the transformation of the university into an efficient and thoroughly accountable environment through which streaming education can be made available in the way that information is delivered: just in time, on demand, in spasms synchronized to the work rhythm of student labor on the shop floor.  The university has not only casualized its own labor force; it continusouly operates as a kind of fusion reactor for casualization more generally, directly serving the casual economy by supplying it with flexible student labor (that is, by providing flex workers with the identity of “student"), normalizing and generalizing the experience of casual work.  The casualization of the higher education teacher has been accompanied by the wholesale reinventing of what it means to be an undergraduate: the identity of “student” has been disarticulated from the concept and possibility of leisure and vigorously rearticulated to contingent labor.  In the twenty-first century, “being a student” names a way of work.  The graduate employee understands that the gen-x and millenial structure of feeling proceeds from the generational register of the …

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Thursday, June 26, 2008

Choice Quotes: Joe Berry #3

This post continues the thread of choice quotes from Joe Berry’s Reclaiming the Ivory Tower.

From “Getting Down to Work” (114-5):

Our years of schooling tend to convince us that the best way to change anything is to learn all we can about it and then write up our findings and conclusions in the most balanced, rational, complete, and detailed way we can.  We have been conditioned to think that finding the full truth about something, whether in our own academic field or our employment situation, will make us free all by itself.  Unfortunately, this is not the case.  My father, a teacher for over forty years from secondary to graduate school levels, used to toll me that too much formal education tended to make people lose their common sense.  He blamed formal education for the fact that it took most teachers until the 1960s and 1970s to realize they needed a union when most carpenters had figured it out by 1900 or 1910.  The idea that individually knowing the truth would make us free, without any collective action on our part, was an example, to him, of that loss of common sense.  Luckily, even the “overeducated” can still learn, albeit sometimes painfully and slowly.  The key to this learning is doing it together.

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Wednesday, June 25, 2008

Tips for Talking to the Not-So-Tech-Savvy

I am not the top tech guy I know.  Still, when I talk to colleagues or friends about some new tech tool, many of their faces go blank.  As most folks know, talking tech can often lead to frustration and tension when the parties involved have differing levels of knowledge.  To ease this tension, Web Worker Daily has put together a useful list of tips for dealing with folks who are not as tech savvy as you may be.  Sure, they may not all apply—or they may seem extremely basic—but they are good reminders before heading into any meeting or orientation that has an audience.

Monday, June 23, 2008

Teach Business Writing?  Check This Out…

Courtesy of Web Worker Daily, HP provides a collection of free templates for numerous types of business documents.  There are plenty of documents adjuncts can use in their own personal and professional lives as well as in the classroom, including calendars, flyers, letterheads, and business cards.