Multilitteratus Incognitus

Running on silent mode this week. Working on paper Working on Thanksgiving prep Looking forward to weekend

Over the summer I took INSDSG 605, a course which is all about new media. As a way of experimenting with a wiki, I started a course called Greek4Travelers on wikidot.com . I really didn't get far with the wiki because as most course and content creators know, creating curriculum does take up a lot of time. I would love to revisit the topic though at some point because my moodle implementation of the class was more fleshed out compared to my wiki. I would really like to bring that thought-out content to a free wiki for anyone who wants to take a crash course in Greek for traveling purposes. I thought of using this wiki like the 'teach yourself' series of books where the learner takes the initiative to learn things and stay in sequence. The benefit of having it in a wiki format is that as things change (such as slang), it's easier to make the changes to the curriculum compared to a book or a static webpage. If you are looking for a Wiki that is on the geek side - check o...

OK, so I did some searching on our wonderful library databases and I found an article in the Harvard Business Review on customer service. Since my observation paper was of customer service interactions, it makes sense that I pick a written text that deals with customer service. I've read the article, reviewed the observation data, and outlined what I am analyzing, now I just need to do the analysis. It seems like Black Friday for me will be more about paper writing than shopping - which is A-OK since I have neither the money to do shopping, nor the patience to wait in lines for deals that seem worthless. Give me a $300 MacBook Pro (a new one) and I will stand in line, your current deals seem kinda m'eh to me. Anyway, my linguistics class seems to be getting more interesting. We've gotten a bit into grammar and morphology, something that I didn't think that I would have much interest in. Well, morphology I thought I would like a bit since I am interested in the origin o...

I think this article is pretty interesting ( direct link: click ) I personally think that this isn't just a standards issue, and a proprietary vs. open issue, but it is also an issue of proper practices and quality storage media. Recently I read a blog post of one of my blogging colleagues in Greece that irretrievably lost his valuable data (from ten years ago) that was residing on CD-Rs. Luckily my insistence of expensive storage media and slow recording speeds has spared (most) of my data, including those silly little reports I did in High School, but how long will optical media last? Archival quality media can last for half a century, or more, but is copying over and over a viable solution? After all bit and bytes will eventually be corrupted from the continuous migration. FULL ARTICLE: ScienceDaily (Oct. 29, 2008) — What stands a better chance of surviving 50 years from now, a framed photograph or a 10-megabyte digital photo file on your computer’s hard drive? The framed photo...

OK, so now I've got something to keep me going in my linguistics class - as much as I bemoan homework at times, I feel like I am a masochist for it! Anyway, I've got my paper assignment for paper number two. With this paper I've got options, many options! One, obvious, option is to compare the text of a conversation that I observed to the text of an article and note differences in morphology and other linguistic factors discussed in class. OK, I could do that, but it seems like a hunt-and-peck option in other words somewhat easy - I may be wrong. The other option is to pick a language that I am somewhat familiar with, find a native speaker and analyze certain aspects of their speech and how they use language. This option has three sub-options. The problem with this option is that the languages I am interested in exploring (japanese, russian or chinese), I have no access to native speakers for! I raked my brain and found a good compromise! Vietnamese! I had studied Vietnam...

The issue of a PhD (or EdD, or D.B.A.) has come up many times in recent years. After I graduated with an M.B.A. and I applied for the M.Sc. program the question was "why don't you go for a PhD?" I thought about it, but I didn't really find something that satisfied my intellectual curiosity. Once I got my M.S., and I applied for an M.A. and an M.Ed. the same question became even louder from friends, family, and faculty members who really wanted me to strive for something larger. I decided to apply for the M.A. and M.Ed. programs anyway, satisfy my intellectual curiosity in those subject matters (and while at it apply what I learned to my day job) and I made myself a promise to look into a doctorate. Truth be told, I would love to get a doctorate, but there are two issues at hand. First there is the obvious economic issue. Most doctorates are full time ventures. If you are a family person, with regular expenses such as a mortgage or a car payment, you can't just qui...

Now, don't get me wrong. At work I use Microsoft Office for the Mac and for Windows on a daily basis. It's a necessary evil. People just send me attachments in the all too familiar doc, xls and ppt formats. When the clock strikes 5 and I get off work, that's where MS Office and I part ways. As a student it just doesn't make sense to pay $150 for the student edition of Microsoft Office! If you're a non-student this price balloons to $317 if you want all the trimmings. I still have papers to write, presentations to prepare and spreadsheets to crunch. What is a student to do? Well, In the past year I've found the perfect solution to my office troubles. This solution is a combination of free and for-pay tools. OpenOffice - this is completely free. It has programs that do essentially what Microsoft office does, for free! And, it's quite compatible with Microsoft Office files, so you don't have to worry (much) about opening files that your friends and colleag...

Well, registration period is now open for the Spring semester. I logged into the student system yesterday and I registered for my Spring classes - all of them Applied Linguistics. By the end of Spring 2009 I will be half-way done with both Instructional Design and Applied Linguistics. With registration complete, I can't help but feel that this is now a lame duck semester. It is true that I still have one exam and one paper due for my fall linguistics class (and 5 weeks of lectures) before the semester is officially over, but it's like a switch flipped in my brain and this semester's value, or importance has been downplayed - like a lame duck president. There is still time left for the class to turn ugly if you don't watch it, but you can't help but think 'this is it'. I wonder if other students feel the same way...