A little history on the SSAWW Newsletter

The Fall 2015 SSAWW Newsletter is now available at the SSAWW site:

https://ssawwnew.files.wordpress.com/2013/06/ssaww-16-2-fall-20151.pdf

Since 2008 when I took over as SSAWW VP for Publications and newsletter editor, it has grown from 8 to 28 pages, largely because the members generously voted in 2010 to discontinue the paper version in favor of a web version.

Switching to the web had many benefits, as the members realized.

For one thing, all the money that used to go to printing now goes to the SSAWW Graduate Student Travel Fund. Eliminating printing meant eliminating a lot of paper waste, too, for a greener option.

The newsletter uses color now, which would have been too expensive pre-web, and the New Books pages added to the newsletter in 2011 are much more attractive in color.  The template is in Pages (an old version), and I chose the reddish header color so that it would align with the colors of Legacy (http://legacywomenwriters.org/).

If you want to see any of the back issues from 2008 on, they’re here: https://ssawwnew.wordpress.com/membership/newsletter/

Unfortunately, we don’t have any copies of issues prior to 2008, when the newsletter was edited by its founder and my wonderful predecessor, Karen Dandurand, for whom the SSAWW Lifetime Achievement Award is named: https://ssawwnew.wordpress.com/awards/  If you have copies, we’d like to scan them and put them on the site, so please contact me.

If Yosemite 10.10.5 broke Word 2008 on your computer, here’s a solution

Yosemite 10.10.5 descended on my Mac on September 19, and, as usual, programs began crashing in droves. Well, Word 2008 and Preview, the two programs I use most, broke, rendering the Mac useless for most work.

Word would open, crash, ask me about “Report this problem to Microsoft?” and display a crash report.  I tried opening in Safe Mode, restarting, resetting the Font Library, and other suggestions found online.

According to this thread and this thread, the problem is that documents with Track Changes were open in Word when the update occurred.  Here’s what worked:

1. Open Word but hold down the Shift key as it opens to prevent the documents from automatically loading. (Here is the source of the information: http://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/56684/is-there-a-way-to-stop-ms-word-from-automatically-opening-previously-opened-docu)
2. Once Word opens, go to File -> Open Recent -> Clear Recent and clear out those files.
3. Shut down Word and restart it.
4. Open the files that you need. You can even open and save the ones that were open during the 10.10.5 update, and they seem to be unharmed.

This seems to work for Word.  It doesn’t work for Preview, so I have switched to Adobe Reader for now.

It’s not clear to me why Yosemite 10.10.5 has such a grudge against Word and its Track Changes feature, but that’s a matter for the wizards in Redmond and Cupertino to solve.

Site updates: Mary Austin

I’m updating the links on the Mary Austin page since they are out of date.

A lot of links at the site are out of date because they lead to the University of Virginia’s etext library, a great resource in the early days of the web, since these were reliably transcribed editions.

Now, however, these UVa resources have been locked down behind a subscription wall and are no longer available.

I’ll substitute Google Books links when possible, since these have the benefit of showing the page images.

Laptops in the classroom? A reasoned response.

Short answer: yes, if it works for your teaching, and no, if it doesn’t. Used selectively, they can really help. But “selectively” has proven to be the key, at least in the classes I teach.

I’ve been teaching with technology for a long time and have adopted new technologies as they emerged.  When laptops started being common in classrooms circa 2004, I took a wait-and-see approach.

“Wait” is a lot of what I did, actually.

Me: “Student, what did you see in this passage?”
Student: [Looks up from laptop and stares blankly at me.]
Me, repeating the question: “Student, what does X mean by this phrase?”
Student: “What? Where are we? I didn’t hear the question.”

Buoyed by the hype surrounding laptops in classrooms–because at heart I’m a tech enthusiast–I waited. I watched this process unfold for seven years before addressing it.

I watched student participation slow down. I wanted to believe the hype, but I wasn’t seeing the benefits emerge. It’s not the students’ faults; everyone has trouble staying focused with a ready source of distraction available.

(And no, doodling on paper or looking out the window isn’t the same thing. These are students communing with their own brains, not someone else’s, and I have no problem with that. There’s research to show that this may actually heighten the listener’s awareness.)

Then I limited the use of laptops in classrooms except under certain circumstances. I explained why, and I said that three hours a week was not too much for all of us to devote to talking to each other about literature. We still use laptops, but on selected days.

Here’s the principal result: More engaged students and better class discussion. Better retention on quizzes. Better analysis in papers.

TL; DR: I wanted to believe that the experience would be enhanced with laptops, but the opposite proved true over 7 years. Your mileage may vary, but that’s why I limited laptop use in my classes.