Good News, Bad News (professionally speaking)

I inherited a bunch of corny jokes from my father, and I'm trying to be faithful and pass them on to the next generation.  Among them are a set of good news - bad news jokes.  I think my dad's favorite was:

The first mate goes below deck on one of those galley ships where slaves have to row with long oars to make the boat move.  He announces to the slaves, "I have good news and bad news; which do you want to hear first?"  They say, "Give us the good news."  So the first mate says, "The good news is that we're having steak for supper!"  Everyone cheers until one guy says, "Well what's the bad news?"  The first mate says, "After supper the captain wants to go water skiing."

My favorite is:

A cowboy injured his leg while rustling cattle, and it had to be amputated.  After he had woken up from the surgery the doctor came to him and said, "Well, I've got some good news and some bad news; which do you want to hear first?"  The cowboy thought a second then said, "Give me the bad news, doc."  So the doctor said a bit sheepishly, "OK, I'm afraid that we cut off the wrong leg, so we're going to have to go back into surgery again.  Sorry."  The cowboy said, "Are you serious??  That's awful.  What could possibly be the good news in this?"  The doctor answered, "Well, there's a guy down on the third floor who said that he'd buy your boots."

This weekend for me has been one of good news and bad news in the professional arena.  Which do you want to hear first?  The bad news?  OK.  I found out that I did not get a big grant I had applied for with a couple of other people.  We made it through the first round and were invited to submit a final proposal in October.  We really thought that it was going to go through and propel us into superstardom in the world of philosophy (which isn't really saying that much).  But evidently it was not meant to be.  And unfortunately they didn't even tell us why--just the standard, "There was very strong competition and we wish we could have funded all of the proposals."

So what's the good news, you ask?  I was mailed an advance copy of Dec 26th edition of The Christian Century, and the article I wrote for them awhile back is the cover article.  That was an unexpected surprise. I wrote an article on cosmology and theology for them back during the summer.  The editor and I had some positive emails back and forth, that resulted in his saying, "we'll move toward publication of this."  Then about three weeks ago I received a pdf of the proofs, but still didn't know it was going to be the featured story.

Now, most of you reading this probably aren't familiar with the The Christian Century.  It is a bi-weekly magazine aimed primarily at the Protestant mainline community (United Methodists, Lutherans, Presbyterians, Episcopals, and so on).  I like to read it to stay abreast of the wider Christian thinking in the country.  At some point in the two-week cycle my article should be available on their website here.  They say that they make all of the magazine articles available on a rotating basis.  Then after the following edition comes out, I think it will be permanently available.

Now I'm sitting by the phone, waiting for the Tonight Show to tell me when the jet will arrive to pick me up for my interview.

Why I Write - Part I

When a (very) minor scholar like myself has his work noticed by other (usually minor) scholars, it is something of a rush.  When I published my first real scholarly article (the Stump Speeches in the Bethel Beacon probably don't qualify) -- "History of Science Through Koyre's Lenses" in Studies in History and Philosophy of Science -- there was a guy from Japan who wrote to me because he had seen a reference to the article and wanted a copy of it.  Of course I obliged and sent off a copy of the page proofs to him with a note of thanks for being interested in my work.  When I went home that night I'm sure I said to my wife something like, "How cool is it that there is a dude in Japan who wants to read my article?!  Japan!  I'm having an international influence!!"

Truth be told, the overwhelming majority of the "scholarly work" that is published has little to no effect on the scholarly world.  So if our motivation for being scholars is to change the world, then in all probability we are going to be disappointed.  Recognition and changing the world are (very) occasional fringe benefits, but that's not why I write.

I write because I want to learn.

There are lots of academic institutions that prize very highly having a well-published faculty.  That helps in attracting grant money, donors, and other well-published faculty.  But mine is not one of those institutions.  We say that we want faculty to be involved in scholarly work, but we define that so broadly that it is hard not to be involved in something that falls under that category.  I'm not trying to change our policy, but just to suggest that we're kidding ourselves if we think that we're really learning new stuff or even keeping up in our fields if we're not writing about it.  The process of writing forces us to think very carefully about a topic, to organize it in our heads, to evaluate strengths and weaknesses of positions, etc.  Yes, we can do that to some extent without putting words to page, but there is a critical degree threshold that is crossed somewhere in the writing process, especially when you know others are going to read it--even more if there is a peer review process involved.

When we as teachers give writing assignments, they are not so much to check if learning has taken place as they are opportunities for learning to take place.  We don't think that our students will really learn the material to the degree we want without synthesizing the information in a writing assignment.  Do we think we're any different?  There have been many times that I've read widely and thought about a topic to the point that I thought I had something to say.  But then I tried to write about it only to find that I didn't understand it well enough yet to be able to explain it clearly.  Then laboring through some writing helped me to really learn and understand it.  That's why doctoral programs make you write a dissertation.  That's why academic institutions (should) expect their faculty to write.  That's (at least one of) the reason(s) I write.

Even writing this far-from-polished blog entry on writing has given me some more ideas about why I write.  So I've added "Part I" to the title.  Perhaps this will become a series of entries that try to sort this out.

Tuesday's Blog about Blogging

Communication 101 drills into you that the first rule in communicating is to know your audience. Blogging by its very nature renders that almost impossible. I tried to do something about that.

Last week's blog about the blogging process yielded six people who revealed themselves from behind the mask of anonymity. How does that affect things? If I know who is out there, am I no longer blogging and now essentially writing letters to them?

I really want to be hip and with the times (though by using such a locution I probably render myself unfit for membership in the club), but I still would like to see a carefully articulated philosophy of blogging.

Tuesday's Blog about Blogging

So I have down somewhere on my sidebar a blurb about the book Chad Meister and I are writing. I've been using this blog to start a groundswell of support that will launch the book onto the best seller list. LOL. (Aside: that's the first time I've ever written "LOL" in an electronic medium; I'm not sure if the context or syntax is entirely correct. Also I feel a little bit deceptive in that I wasn't actually laughing out loud--more like chuckling to myself. But I didn't think anyone would know what CTM would mean.)

Actually, I've been using this blog as a sort of propaedeutic to writing the book. In the evenings when I work on the book, I prime the pump of the writing by putting words down in this blog. It is interesting to me that writing anything can help the process of writing well. This is one of the positive effects of blogging even if no one is listening.

Last Tuesday when I wrote a kind of whining blog (maybe this will become a Tuesday Tradition competing with Terry's Tuesday Travel Tips here?!) wondering about the merits of blogging, two apparently faithful readers responded with encouraging comments. I followed the links to their own blogs where they were kind enough to mention Stump Speeches by name. This advertising has resulted in my Feedburner Stats yielding the following: I've gone from 2 subscribers down to 0 subscribers; and from 3 live hits in 21.5 hours down to 1 hit in the past 25 hours. Ouch! Don't put those guys in charge of your ad campaign!!

To be fair, I've had more comments this week than the others. But the moral of the story is that whether or not anyone reads this, it is getting the writing juices flowing. If that's all that comes, then it will have been worthwhile. I'm signing off to edit chapter seven.

If PowerPoint makes you stupid, what does blogging do?

I just finished leading a seminar on using PowerPoint for some faculty. I gave the qualifier at the beginning that I'm very sympathetic to the charges going around a couple of years ago that PowerPoint makes you stupid. There was an article in the New York Times with that title. The claim is basically that the way PP is used by most, it becomes a dumbing down of complex issues into lists of bullet points. The cognitive style of PP does not lend itself to critical thinking. So, I tried to steer people into what I think are more legitimate uses of the program--namely showing pictures and giving quotations.

I wonder what the cognitive style of blogging is... How is this training us to think and interact? The threaded discussions that appear on Facebook, etc., are interesting in that they provide a forum for you to think about something before saying it--as opposed to the classroom discussion where I have to be more impromptu and off the cuff. I like that. (Of course there is a lot of off-the-cuff threaded discussion, but the possibility is there for it to be more reflective.)

Blogging, however, is more like a monologue. It is like making speeches or writing essays. It can certainly be used to sharpen one's own thought. But as far as impacting others, I'm not confident that there are many bloggers who are going to change the world. According to my Feedburner Stats, there have been three hits on my blog in the last 21.5 hours. I assume that means there have been three people who have actually made it to the site. That's not exactly a crowd.

So if it were this difficult thing to get "published", then only the strong survive and everyone who wants to read goes to the same thing. Now getting "published" on the web is as easy as writing a letter. Supply and demand. Given the glut of blog supply, there's not much demand.

It seems, then, that the benefit of writing this is primarily for myself. Why put it on the web, then? Hmmm...

In the beginning...

"Words, words, words" -- Hamlet

"In the beginning was the Word" -- Apostle John

The proliferation of blogs seems to be saying something similar to Andy Warhol's Mona Lisa -- what is the point of a masterpiece if it can be reproduced ad infinitum? The explosion of words has rendered them almost meaningless. Who can hope to say anything worth saying? Who would read it? Perhaps it is enough that these words exist in cyberspace as electronic blips on a server somewhere. Are they ideas in the mind of a silicon god?

And yet write we must. There is something essentially human about keeping a written record of our thoughts. So begins my blogging journey...