(cross-posted, with some edits for clarity, from the other Planned Obsolescence)

So I left a post on the blog associated with the book project the other day, driven by the fact that I’d woken up in the middle of the night thinking, gee, where will readers of Planned Obsolescence do the kind of summary, synthetic commenting that attempts to make connections across the book? Not knowing how else to manage it, I figured I’d start an open thread, and let anybody who wanted to leave non-site-specific comments do so there.

As it turns out, however, the CommentPress installation that the book is published in runs in this nifty software package called multi-user WordPress — you may have heard of it! — which allows blogs to have as many authors as the blog’s owner (that would be me) would like. And those authors can create posts themselves, can organize discussion themselves, can tag their ideas themselves, and so on.

Boy, it’s amazing what these blogs can do!

(Ahem.)

So… the short of it is that the developers have woken me the rest of the way up and shown me how to provide a much more free-form space for open discussion of the book. All you have to do is register for an account over there by clicking “Log In” in the toolbar, and then clicking “Register” under the login form. Those of you who’ve already created accounts have been made authors, so you now have full posting privileges; I’ll add those privileges for other registered users as they appear.

I hope you’ll use that blog however you would like, to have any discussions around the book that you’d like. I’ll be interested to follow along!

The newest episode of the Digital Campus podcast, #44 – Unsettled, is up, and I’m thrilled that it mentions Planned Obsolescence. Digital Campus, produced by the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University, is a fantastic resource for those thinking about the future of technology and academic work, and I’m honored that my project is included.

You go!

Today’s the day: the project that I’ve been working on for the last year and a half is at last live and open for your reading and commenting pleasure. Planned Obsolescence: Publishing, Technology, and the Future of the Academy will, if all goes according to plan, come out in print sometime next year from NYU Press, but it’s available right now, in commentable form, via MediaCommons Press.

Today’s also the day I get to unveil MediaCommons Press itself, a project we’ve been working toward for several months now. MediaCommons Press is the second major project hosted by MediaCommons, and it is dedicated, as the header has it, to open scholarship in open formats. MediaCommons Press hopes to promote the digital publication of texts ranging from article- to monograph-length, in forms ranging from the traditional to the experimental, serving all areas of scholarship in media studies.

So, with these two announcements together, today’s the day I put my money where my mouth is, both by demonstrating the effectiveness of the MediaCommons publishing model and demonstrating, as I argue most strongly for in the book, the importance of open online peer review.

I hope you’ll come by and join the discussion. And I also hope you’ll consider joining in by publishing with us. MediaCommons has developed into a thriving community network in media studies; we’re excited to take the first steps today in transforming that network into a viable, community-based scholarly publishing system.

I went to bed last night about 11.30, and got up this morning around 7.30. And inbetween, didn’t receive a single piece of email. For some reason, I’m having a hard time accepting this — nothing from my listservs, nothing from my students, nothing from random spammers. Nothing. Why is it that eight hours of radio silence, over a Saturday night and into Sunday morning, has me convinced that something is wrong?

I’ve been using Things as my task manager for some time now, both on my desktop and on my iPhone, and have absolutely loved it. It’s clean, super-functional, and generally trouble-free.

But then last week I found something even better to love about it. It allows you to set recurring tasks, of course — all decent task managers do. But it allows you to set those tasks pegged not just to a certain fixed span of time, but to a certain time frame since the last time you did the task. Which is excellent for those tasks you really need to do more frequently but tend to stall a bit on.

Say, for instance, you need to clean out the litterbox, and you want to do it every other day. For the sake of argument. If you’ve got a regular recurrent every-other-day task set up, and then you don’t clean out the litterbox on the first day the task appears in your to-do list, but do manage to clean it out the next day, you run the risk of being annoyed when a second “clean out the litterbox” reminder appears the very next day. In fact, you’re likely just to delete that one and wait for the next one. Not that I have any experience with that.

But if you set the task up with an interval that only begins after completion, and you stall one day on cleaning out the litterbox, the next reminder appears two days later, at the point when the task really needs to be done again.

It’s a small difference, but it’s really changed my relationship to some of my recurrent tasks, and how I respond when they appear in my list for the day’s tasks.

After I was told last Sunday that it was likely I had picked up H1N1, whether on top of a case of bronchitis or masquerading as a case of bronchitis, I took myself back to bed with my laptop and started emailing.

Fortunately, we’d had a presentation from the Dean of Students about our response to H1N1 at our first faculty meeting. Even before that, I’d already told my students that in the event of flu, I was prepared to be seriously lax about my attendance policy, begging them to stay out of class if there was any chance they might be contagious. The Dean of Students backed that decision up — but also told the faculty, who are all prone to feeling like we need to push on through an illness, that if we got sick, we should stay home, too.

“Make a contingency plan,” she said. Figure out who can cover your classes, and how you’ll manage if you have to miss a couple of weeks.

Seemed like good advice to me at the time — Friday, September 4 — but it never would have occurred to me that I needed to be taking it already.

So Sunday, after getting home from the urgent care place, I first emailed a group of my colleagues and asked if any of them would be able to meet with one or the other of my classes on Monday, and possibly Wednesday as well, saying that I mostly just needed them to get the classes started, that I’d post instructions online for how the students should use their class time. A couple of friends responded right away, each offering to cover one class, so that was set.

I emailed the dean of students and the dean of the college, telling them what was going on, and that I was making arrangements.

I emailed both of my classes, telling them I’d be out but that they should come to class anyhow, and that they should bring their laptops if they have them.

And then I set up the classes themselves. We use Sakai as a course management system in Claremont, in an installation managed on one campus but serving all five of the undergraduate colleges and, to a lesser extent, the graduate school. Sakai is tied into both our (very differently structured) LDAP servers and our (somewhat less different) student information portal, such that students from any of the undergraduate colleges are automatically added and dropped from Sakai classes as their registration status changes. We’ve also got pretty good control, as instructors, over the configuration of the Sakai modules we want to use in our classes; we can shut off and make invisible anything we don’t want cluttering up the system, and we can use a pretty wide range of tools as we see fit.

Because I’ve been teaching with blogs and wikis since about 2003, I’ve only used Sakai as a server for course materials that need to be behind a password wall — stuff for which I want to ensure fair use by restricting access to my students. But now I had the opportunity to test the system out a bit more.

I added the colleagues who’d offered to meet with my classes to each class as an auditor, so that they’d be able to log into Sakai on the classroom computer and project anything that needed to be displayed for the class. I then posted announcements in each class’s Sakai site describing the day’s work, listing the questions I wanted the students to discuss in small groups, first, and then how I wanted them to present the results of that discussion to the larger group and to collect lingering questions thereafter.

I also turned on Sakai’s chat room function, and created chat rooms for each of the small groups, asking that each small group use their chat room to take notes on their discussion and to raise any questions that they had for me. And I asked that, at the point they move to conversation as a full group, that someone take notes in the main chat room, and that they use that chat room to collect their lingering questions for discussion next time.

Each class on Monday was structured more or less the same — half an hour in small groups discussing a set of questions about the texts they’d read, then a transition to presentations and discussion in the larger group. Unsurprisingly, this worked better in one class than the other. One of my classes is a 14-student seminar, and they took rather brilliantly to both the discussions and the note-taking; they seemed overall to get to the key points of the texts they were to discuss and they seemed engaged in what they were up to throughout. The other class has 36 students, and their response was more mixed; probably two-thirds of the class had what seemed to me, based on the chat room evidence, to be a productive and compelling discussion, and the other third… well, not so much. Honestly, though, I’m not sure how different that ratio would have been had I been in the room.

Given that it worked well enough on Monday, and that I was clearly not getting out of bed anytime soon, I set more or less the same thing up for Wednesday with the seminar, and it seemed to work well again.

With the larger class, my colleague offered to give a short lecture on an area within her specialization that bears a strong relationship to the work that we were doing that week, and to use that lecture as the jumping-off point for a discussion that she’d facilitate. I asked that somebody take notes in the chat room, so that I could have a sense of how the discussion went — and, in fact, several somebodies did, giving me a pretty rich view of at least the ideas floating around in the room, if not of where they originated or how they developed.

I’m pleased with this outcome, on the whole; rather than entirely throwing off the flow of the semester by canceling classes for a week, I was able, thanks to my colleagues and to the technologies I have available, to keep the students moving forward, and I was able to get at least a partial sense of what they did in my absence. It felt a bit like peeking through a keyhole, but that limited view was far, far better than nothing.

I’m now thinking that I want to keep that backchannel active for the rest of the semester, even once I’m back in the classroom — which I’m still seriously hoping will be Monday, though I’m not at all sure. I want to talk with the students themselves, anyhow, and find out what they got out of the experience of using the backchannel in their discussions — did it help them coalesce ideas, for instance, as they were able to see how other students in the room understood what was being said? But I want to keep it in place in no small part for the benefit of the students who I fully expect are going to be in the same position I was in the coming weeks — if they can get even a narrow sense of what’s going on in class discussions, and participate even a bit in them, it might help keep the semester from breaking down for all of us.

This semester has thus far not gone according to plan. We’re on the cusp of what is technically the fourth week of classes, and I’ve been in the classroom precisely twice: once on Wednesday, September 2, for the first day introduction and syllabus discussion, and once on Monday, September 7, for an actual teaching day. I had a meeting in New York starting on Thursday of that week, and so had already cancelled classes for Wednesday the 9th, building that absence into my class schedules.

What I hadn’t counted on was developing a cough about 30 seconds after I finished teaching on the 2nd, as noted in my last post. This cough started as what I assumed was irritation from all the smoke in the air from the Station Fire to our west, and then turned into the dry tickle-in-your-throat cough produced by post-nasal drip. Which is what it still was on the 9th, as I headed for New York.

By the time I got to New York, though, the cough had begun to turn — no longer dry but wet and awful, a racking, nasty cough accompanied by an octave-plus drop in my voice which left me sounding like a long-term pack-a-day smoker. I assumed that the cough had turned into a bronchial infection, and when I continued getting worse on Friday, I called my doctor back home and wheedled my way into an appointment on Tuesday afternoon.

Saturday, though, as I made my way through the subway, Penn Station, the NJ Transit train, the AirTrain, the Newark airport, the Houston airport, and so on, it started to become clear that Something was Wrong. My voice was almost shot, my cough was getting worse and worse, and I was exhausted, easily winded when walking, and just generally felt like crap. I got home that night, expecting to spend all day Sunday in bed assessing whether or not I could teach on Monday.

Sunday morning I woke up with all of the same symptoms as Saturday, plus the addition of horrible abdominal cramps, cramps which started just under my ribcage and twisted down through my muscles and organs without — well, without producing any of the expected resolutions involved in abdominal cramps. It was at this point that I started thinking, okay, what if this bronchial infection has turned into pneumonia, and what if it’s spreading into some more systemic infection?

I live alone right now. And so I had to get myself to the urgent care place while I knew that I was in reasonable shape to drive myself there, and to drive myself back. So I set about the process of getting permission to go to the urgent care place: I called my doctor’s office and left a message with the answering service, who paged the on-call doctor, who called me and said yes, she was worried that this was turning into pneumonia, too, and that I should go to the ER or to urgent care.

Nothing is simple, of course: the medical group that I’m assigned to under my HMO is in a dispute with the nearest hospital, which is now refusing to provide service to us based on the HMO’s refusal to pay a sufficient percentage of what it owes them. And I’ve never been to the next-nearest hospital — honestly don’t even know where it is, and didn’t feel like this was the moment to try to find out. So I ruled out the ER and started trying to figure out if a nearby urgent care place accepts my insurance; happily, they did, so I was on the way.

On one level, it turned out to be a good choice: Sunday around noon, the only patients in there were me, one guy with a lower-leg injury, and one guy trying to get a vaccination of some sort. So they took me right back, were able to do a chest x-ray then and there, did a pretty thorough examination, and wound up both giving me a prescription for antibiotics and high-end cough syrup and swabbing me for H1N1.

Here’s the downside, though; as of this morning, nearly a full week later, I still didn’t know the outcome of that test. The lab picked the test up on Monday, and I was told I’d have the results by Thursday, but I’d called every day since then to no avail. One key difference between “urgent” and “emergent” is, I guess, the speed of the lab results.

In the interim, though, I basically operated under the assumption that this was in fact H1N1. The antibiotics helped some of my symptoms very quickly, but not all of them, by any means. And the more I saw about H1N1’s onset — dry cough, followed by a brief period of feeling better, followed by wet cough and a sudden turn into feeling much, much worse — the more familiar it all sounded.

But I just got the results — 11 am, Saturday — and they’re negative. Which means I’m back to assuming that this is bronchitis, probably of a viral kind, since the antibiotics helped but did not entirely clear up the problems. And I think I may have bruised a rib with all the coughing, as one spot on my rib cage has just been killing me since yesterday.

When it might be swine flu, my course of action was clear: stay home and away from everyone until the coughing goes away. But now… it’s not swine flu, and the coughing’s not going away. Is the course of action the same? I was able to manage staying home last week — how, exactly, I’ll discuss in the next post — but I’m not sure I can do it again.

The semester started here just shy of a week ago, but because my classes fall on Monday and Wednesday, today’s my first real day of teaching. Labor Day. Usually (where “usually” = about 4 out of 10 years) classes here start the day after Labor Day; when they start the week before, we still start on Tuesday, and then teach on Labor Day. Which continues to make no sense to me at all.

I wouldn’t even mind that so much — I’m really fired up about my classes, which include a seminar on Marxism and Cultural Studies that I haven’t gotten to teach in several years, and a new class on television authorship; I’ve got piles of work ahead of me, but it ought to be great fun — except for the fact that I managed to get about two hours of sleep last night due to the stupid cough I’ve developed from the lousy air quality out here in the wake of the fires to our west.

The annoying part is that I’m actually getting better, just as I’m feeling worse. Last Wednesday afternoon, just after classes ended, I suddenly felt as though I’d chain-smoked a pack of cigarettes, and my lungs griped and complained for several days after. Now, my lungs feel more or less fine, but that incessant tickle deep in the back of my throat has set in, probably a sign of healing tissue or something, but it’s driving me batty. It will not let you not cough, though coughing of course aggravates it. It will wake you up out of a dead sleep to make sure you know you need to cough. And no combination of cough drops and throat sprays will calm it down.

This is not what I want to be thinking about right now, but the combination of non-stop coughing and lack of sleep have me unable to contemplate much else.